A novel biomedical image indexing and retrieval system via deep preference learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Pang, Shuchao; Orgun, Mehmet A; Yu, Zhezhou

2018-05-01

The traditional biomedical image retrieval methods as well as content-based image retrieval (CBIR) methods originally designed for non-biomedical images either only consider using pixel and low-level features to describe an image or use deep features to describe images but still leave a lot of room for improving both accuracy and efficiency. In this work, we propose a new approach, which exploits deep learning technology to extract the high-level and compact features from biomedical images. The deep feature extraction process leverages multiple hidden layers to capture substantial feature structures of high-resolution images and represent them at different levels of abstraction, leading to an improved performance for indexing and retrieval of biomedical images. We exploit the current popular and multi-layered deep neural networks, namely, stacked denoising autoencoders (SDAE) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) to represent the discriminative features of biomedical images by transferring the feature representations and parameters of pre-trained deep neural networks from another domain. Moreover, in order to index all the images for finding the similarly referenced images, we also introduce preference learning technology to train and learn a kind of a preference model for the query image, which can output the similarity ranking list of images from a biomedical image database. To the best of our knowledge, this paper introduces preference learning technology for the first time into biomedical image retrieval. We evaluate the performance of two powerful algorithms based on our proposed system and compare them with those of popular biomedical image indexing approaches and existing regular image retrieval methods with detailed experiments over several well-known public biomedical image databases. Based on different criteria for the evaluation of retrieval performance, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms outperform the state

Multi-scale biomedical systems: measurement challenges

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Summers, R

2016-01-01

Multi-scale biomedical systems are those that represent interactions in materials, sensors, and systems from a holistic perspective. It is possible to view such multi-scale activity using measurement of spatial scale or time scale, though in this paper only the former is considered. The biomedical application paradigm comprises interactions that range from quantum biological phenomena at scales of 10-12 for one individual to epidemiological studies of disease spread in populations that in a pandemic lead to measurement at a scale of 10+7. It is clear that there are measurement challenges at either end of this spatial scale, but those challenges that relate to the use of new technologies that deal with big data and health service delivery at the point of care are also considered. The measurement challenges lead to the use, in many cases, of model-based measurement and the adoption of virtual engineering. It is these measurement challenges that will be uncovered in this paper. (paper)

Object-oriented biomedical system modelling--the language.

Science.gov (United States)

Hakman, M; Groth, T

1999-11-01

The paper describes a new object-oriented biomedical continuous system modelling language (OOBSML). It is fully object-oriented and supports model inheritance, encapsulation, and model component instantiation and behaviour polymorphism. Besides the traditional differential and algebraic equation expressions the language includes also formal expressions for documenting models and defining model quantity types and quantity units. It supports explicit definition of model input-, output- and state quantities, model components and component connections. The OOBSML model compiler produces self-contained, independent, executable model components that can be instantiated and used within other OOBSML models and/or stored within model and model component libraries. In this way complex models can be structured as multilevel, multi-component model hierarchies. Technically the model components produced by the OOBSML compiler are executable computer code objects based on distributed object and object request broker technology. This paper includes both the language tutorial and the formal language syntax and semantic description.

[The system of biomedical scientific information of Serbia].

Science.gov (United States)

Dacić, M

1995-09-01

Building of the System of biomedical scientific information of Yugoslavia (SBMSI YU) began, by the end of 1980, and the system became operative officially in 1986. After the political disintegration of former Yugoslavia SBMSI of Serbia was formed. SBMSI is developed according to the policy of developing of the System of scientific technologic information of Serbia (SSTI S), and with technical support of SSTI S. Reconstruction of the System is done by using former SBMSI YU as a model. Unlike the former SBMSI YU, SBMSI S owns besides the database Biomedicina Serbica, three important databases: database of doctoral dissertations promoted at University Medical School in Belgrade in the period from 1955-1993, database of Master's theses promoted at the University School of Medicine in Belgrade from 1965-1993; A database of foreign biomedical periodicals in libraries of Serbia.

Biomedical engineering principles

CERN Document Server

Ritter, Arthur B; Valdevit, Antonio; Ascione, Alfred N

2011-01-01

Introduction: Modeling of Physiological ProcessesCell Physiology and TransportPrinciples and Biomedical Applications of HemodynamicsA Systems Approach to PhysiologyThe Cardiovascular SystemBiomedical Signal ProcessingSignal Acquisition and ProcessingTechniques for Physiological Signal ProcessingExamples of Physiological Signal ProcessingPrinciples of BiomechanicsPractical Applications of BiomechanicsBiomaterialsPrinciples of Biomedical Capstone DesignUnmet Clinical NeedsEntrepreneurship: Reasons why Most Good Designs Never Get to MarketAn Engineering Solution in Search of a Biomedical Problem

MOLIERE: Automatic Biomedical Hypothesis Generation System.

Science.gov (United States)

Sybrandt, Justin; Shtutman, Michael; Safro, Ilya

2017-08-01

Hypothesis generation is becoming a crucial time-saving technique which allows biomedical researchers to quickly discover implicit connections between important concepts. Typically, these systems operate on domain-specific fractions of public medical data. MOLIERE, in contrast, utilizes information from over 24.5 million documents. At the heart of our approach lies a multi-modal and multi-relational network of biomedical objects extracted from several heterogeneous datasets from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). These objects include but are not limited to scientific papers, keywords, genes, proteins, diseases, and diagnoses. We model hypotheses using Latent Dirichlet Allocation applied on abstracts found near shortest paths discovered within this network, and demonstrate the effectiveness of MOLIERE by performing hypothesis generation on historical data. Our network, implementation, and resulting data are all publicly available for the broad scientific community.

Peptide-mediated vectorization of metal complexes: conjugation strategies and biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Soler, Marta; Feliu, Lidia; Planas, Marta; Ribas, Xavi; Costas, Miquel

2016-08-16

The rich chemical and structural versatility of transition metal complexes provides numerous novel paths to be pursued in the design of molecules that exert particular chemical or physicochemical effects that could operate over specific biological targets. However, the poor cell permeability of metallodrugs represents an important barrier for their therapeutic use. The conjugation between metal complexes and a functional peptide vector can be regarded as a versatile and potential strategy to improve their bioavailability and accumulation inside cells, and the site selectivity of their effect. This perspective lies in reviewing the recent advances in the design of metallopeptide conjugates for biomedical applications. Additionally, we highlight the studies where this approach has been directed towards the incorporation of redox active metal centers into living organisms for modulating the cellular redox balance, as a tool with application in anticancer therapy.

Biomedical text mining and its applications in cancer research.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhu, Fei; Patumcharoenpol, Preecha; Zhang, Cheng; Yang, Yang; Chan, Jonathan; Meechai, Asawin; Vongsangnak, Wanwipa; Shen, Bairong

2013-04-01

Cancer is a malignant disease that has caused millions of human deaths. Its study has a long history of well over 100years. There have been an enormous number of publications on cancer research. This integrated but unstructured biomedical text is of great value for cancer diagnostics, treatment, and prevention. The immense body and rapid growth of biomedical text on cancer has led to the appearance of a large number of text mining techniques aimed at extracting novel knowledge from scientific text. Biomedical text mining on cancer research is computationally automatic and high-throughput in nature. However, it is error-prone due to the complexity of natural language processing. In this review, we introduce the basic concepts underlying text mining and examine some frequently used algorithms, tools, and data sets, as well as assessing how much these algorithms have been utilized. We then discuss the current state-of-the-art text mining applications in cancer research and we also provide some resources for cancer text mining. With the development of systems biology, researchers tend to understand complex biomedical systems from a systems biology viewpoint. Thus, the full utilization of text mining to facilitate cancer systems biology research is fast becoming a major concern. To address this issue, we describe the general workflow of text mining in cancer systems biology and each phase of the workflow. We hope that this review can (i) provide a useful overview of the current work of this field; (ii) help researchers to choose text mining tools and datasets; and (iii) highlight how to apply text mining to assist cancer systems biology research. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Combinatorial nanodiamond in pharmaceutical and biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Lim, Dae Gon; Prim, Racelly Ena; Kim, Ki Hyun; Kang, Eunah; Park, Kinam; Jeong, Seong Hoon

2016-11-30

One of the newly emerging carbon materials, nanodiamond (ND), has been exploited for use in traditional electric materials and this has extended into biomedical and pharmaceutical applications. Recently, NDs have attained significant interests as a multifunctional and combinational drug delivery system. ND studies have provided insights into granting new potentials with their wide ranging surface chemistry, complex formation with biopolymers, and combination with biomolecules. The studies that have proved ND inertness, biocompatibility, and low toxicity have made NDs much more feasible for use in real in vivo applications. This review gives an understanding of NDs in biomedical engineering and pharmaceuticals, focusing on the classified introduction of ND/drug complexes. In addition, the diverse potential applications that can be obtained with chemical modification are presented. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

[Big data, medical language and biomedical terminology systems].

Science.gov (United States)

Schulz, Stefan; López-García, Pablo

2015-08-01

A variety of rich terminology systems, such as thesauri, classifications, nomenclatures and ontologies support information and knowledge processing in health care and biomedical research. Nevertheless, human language, manifested as individually written texts, persists as the primary carrier of information, in the description of disease courses or treatment episodes in electronic medical records, and in the description of biomedical research in scientific publications. In the context of the discussion about big data in biomedicine, we hypothesize that the abstraction of the individuality of natural language utterances into structured and semantically normalized information facilitates the use of statistical data analytics to distil new knowledge out of textual data from biomedical research and clinical routine. Computerized human language technologies are constantly evolving and are increasingly ready to annotate narratives with codes from biomedical terminology. However, this depends heavily on linguistic and terminological resources. The creation and maintenance of such resources is labor-intensive. Nevertheless, it is sensible to assume that big data methods can be used to support this process. Examples include the learning of hierarchical relationships, the grouping of synonymous terms into concepts and the disambiguation of homonyms. Although clear evidence is still lacking, the combination of natural language technologies, semantic resources, and big data analytics is promising.

[Biomedical informatics].

Science.gov (United States)

Capurro, Daniel; Soto, Mauricio; Vivent, Macarena; Lopetegui, Marcelo; Herskovic, Jorge R

2011-12-01

Biomedical Informatics is a new discipline that arose from the need to incorporate information technologies to the generation, storage, distribution and analysis of information in the domain of biomedical sciences. This discipline comprises basic biomedical informatics, and public health informatics. The development of the discipline in Chile has been modest and most projects have originated from the interest of individual people or institutions, without a systematic and coordinated national development. Considering the unique features of health care system of our country, research in the area of biomedical informatics is becoming an imperative.

A robust approach to extract biomedical events from literature.

Science.gov (United States)

Bui, Quoc-Chinh; Sloot, Peter M A

2012-10-15

The abundance of biomedical literature has attracted significant interest in novel methods to automatically extract biomedical relations from the literature. Until recently, most research was focused on extracting binary relations such as protein-protein interactions and drug-disease relations. However, these binary relations cannot fully represent the original biomedical data. Therefore, there is a need for methods that can extract fine-grained and complex relations known as biomedical events. In this article we propose a novel method to extract biomedical events from text. Our method consists of two phases. In the first phase, training data are mapped into structured representations. Based on that, templates are used to extract rules automatically. In the second phase, extraction methods are developed to process the obtained rules. When evaluated against the Genia event extraction abstract and full-text test datasets (Task 1), we obtain results with F-scores of 52.34 and 53.34, respectively, which are comparable to the state-of-the-art systems. Furthermore, our system achieves superior performance in terms of computational efficiency. Our source code is available for academic use at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10256952/BioEvent.zip.

Natural immunoglobulins (contribution to a debate on biomedical education

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vaz Nelson M

2000-01-01

Full Text Available Immunology has contributed to biomedical education in many important ways since the creation of scientific medicine in the last quarter of the 19th century. Today, immunology is a major area of biomedical research. Nevertheless, there are many basic problems unresolved in immunological activities and phenomena. Solving these problems is probably necessary to devise predictable and safe ways to produce new vaccines, treat allergy and autoimmune diseases and perform safe transplants. This challenge involves not only technical developments but also changes in attitude, of which the most fundamental is to abandon the traditional stimulus-response perspective in favor of more "systemic" views. Describing immunological activities as the operation of a complex multiconnected network, raises biological and epistemological issues not usually dealt with in biomedical education. Here we point to one example of systemic approaches. A new form of immunoblot (Panama blot, by which the reaction of natural immunoglobulins with complex protein mixtures may be analyzed by a special software and multivariate statistics, has been recently used to characterize human autoimmune diseases. Our preliminary data show that Panama blots can also be used to characterize global (systemic immunogical changes in chronic human parasitic diseases, such as malaria and schistosomiasis mansoni, that correlate with the clinical status.

MBA: a literature mining system for extracting biomedical abbreviations.

Science.gov (United States)

Xu, Yun; Wang, ZhiHao; Lei, YiMing; Zhao, YuZhong; Xue, Yu

2009-01-09

The exploding growth of the biomedical literature presents many challenges for biological researchers. One such challenge is from the use of a great deal of abbreviations. Extracting abbreviations and their definitions accurately is very helpful to biologists and also facilitates biomedical text analysis. Existing approaches fall into four broad categories: rule based, machine learning based, text alignment based and statistically based. State of the art methods either focus exclusively on acronym-type abbreviations, or could not recognize rare abbreviations. We propose a systematic method to extract abbreviations effectively. At first a scoring method is used to classify the abbreviations into acronym-type and non-acronym-type abbreviations, and then their corresponding definitions are identified by two different methods: text alignment algorithm for the former, statistical method for the latter. A literature mining system MBA was constructed to extract both acronym-type and non-acronym-type abbreviations. An abbreviation-tagged literature corpus, called Medstract gold standard corpus, was used to evaluate the system. MBA achieved a recall of 88% at the precision of 91% on the Medstract gold-standard EVALUATION Corpus. We present a new literature mining system MBA for extracting biomedical abbreviations. Our evaluation demonstrates that the MBA system performs better than the others. It can identify the definition of not only acronym-type abbreviations including a little irregular acronym-type abbreviations (e.g., ), but also non-acronym-type abbreviations (e.g., ).

LINNAEUS: A species name identification system for biomedical literature

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nenadic Goran

2010-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The task of recognizing and identifying species names in biomedical literature has recently been regarded as critical for a number of applications in text and data mining, including gene name recognition, species-specific document retrieval, and semantic enrichment of biomedical articles. Results In this paper we describe an open-source species name recognition and normalization software system, LINNAEUS, and evaluate its performance relative to several automatically generated biomedical corpora, as well as a novel corpus of full-text documents manually annotated for species mentions. LINNAEUS uses a dictionary-based approach (implemented as an efficient deterministic finite-state automaton to identify species names and a set of heuristics to resolve ambiguous mentions. When compared against our manually annotated corpus, LINNAEUS performs with 94% recall and 97% precision at the mention level, and 98% recall and 90% precision at the document level. Our system successfully solves the problem of disambiguating uncertain species mentions, with 97% of all mentions in PubMed Central full-text documents resolved to unambiguous NCBI taxonomy identifiers. Conclusions LINNAEUS is an open source, stand-alone software system capable of recognizing and normalizing species name mentions with speed and accuracy, and can therefore be integrated into a range of bioinformatics and text-mining applications. The software and manually annotated corpus can be downloaded freely at http://linnaeus.sourceforge.net/.

Enabling Large-Scale Biomedical Analysis in the Cloud

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ying-Chih Lin

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Recent progress in high-throughput instrumentations has led to an astonishing growth in both volume and complexity of biomedical data collected from various sources. The planet-size data brings serious challenges to the storage and computing technologies. Cloud computing is an alternative to crack the nut because it gives concurrent consideration to enable storage and high-performance computing on large-scale data. This work briefly introduces the data intensive computing system and summarizes existing cloud-based resources in bioinformatics. These developments and applications would facilitate biomedical research to make the vast amount of diversification data meaningful and usable.

Biomedical engineering fundamentals

CERN Document Server

Bronzino, Joseph D

2014-01-01

Known as the bible of biomedical engineering, The Biomedical Engineering Handbook, Fourth Edition, sets the standard against which all other references of this nature are measured. As such, it has served as a major resource for both skilled professionals and novices to biomedical engineering.Biomedical Engineering Fundamentals, the first volume of the handbook, presents material from respected scientists with diverse backgrounds in physiological systems, biomechanics, biomaterials, bioelectric phenomena, and neuroengineering. More than three dozen specific topics are examined, including cardia

Three-dimensional biomedical imaging

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Robb, R.A.

1985-01-01

Scientists in biomedical imaging provide researchers, physicians, and academicians with an understanding of the fundamental theories and practical applications of three-dimensional biomedical imaging methodologies. Succinct descriptions of each imaging modality are supported by numerous diagrams and illustrations which clarify important concepts and demonstrate system performance in a variety of applications. Comparison of the different functional attributes, relative advantages and limitations, complementary capabilities, and future directions of three-dimensional biomedical imaging modalities are given. Volume 1: Introductions to Three-Dimensional Biomedical Imaging Photoelectronic-Digital Imaging for Diagnostic Radiology. X-Ray Computed Tomography - Basic Principles. X-Ray Computed Tomography - Implementation and Applications. X-Ray Computed Tomography: Advanced Systems and Applications in Biomedical Research and Diagnosis. Volume II: Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography. Position Emission Tomography (PET). Computerized Ultrasound Tomography. Fundamentals of NMR Imaging. Display of Multi-Dimensional Biomedical Image Information. Summary and Prognostications

Biomedical engineering and nanotechnology

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Pawar, S.H.; Khyalappa, R.J.; Yakhmi, J.V.

2009-01-01

This book is predominantly a compilation of papers presented in the conference which is focused on the development in biomedical materials, biomedical devises and instrumentation, biomedical effects of electromagnetic radiation, electrotherapy, radiotherapy, biosensors, biotechnology, bioengineering, tissue engineering, clinical engineering and surgical planning, medical imaging, hospital system management, biomedical education, biomedical industry and society, bioinformatics, structured nanomaterial for biomedical application, nano-composites, nano-medicine, synthesis of nanomaterial, nano science and technology development. The papers presented herein contain the scientific substance to suffice the academic directivity of the researchers from the field of biomedicine, biomedical engineering, material science and nanotechnology. Papers relevant to INIS are indexed separately

Cloud Based Metalearning System for Predictive Modeling of Biomedical Data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Milan Vukićević

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Rapid growth and storage of biomedical data enabled many opportunities for predictive modeling and improvement of healthcare processes. On the other side analysis of such large amounts of data is a difficult and computationally intensive task for most existing data mining algorithms. This problem is addressed by proposing a cloud based system that integrates metalearning framework for ranking and selection of best predictive algorithms for data at hand and open source big data technologies for analysis of biomedical data.

Machine learning and complex-network for personalized and systems biomedicine

KAUST Repository

Cannistraci, Carlo Vittorio

2016-01-27

The talk will begin with an introduction on using machine learning to discover hidden information and unexpected patterns in large biomedical datasets. Then, recent results on the use of complex network theory in biomedicine and neuroscience will be discussed. In particular, metagenomics and metabolomics data, approaches for drug-target repositioning, functional/structural MR connectomes and gut-brain axis data will be presented. The conclusion will outline the novel and exciting perspectives offered by the translation of these methods from systems biology to systems medicine.

Biomedical semantics in the Semantic Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Splendiani, Andrea; Burger, Albert; Paschke, Adrian; Romano, Paolo; Marshall, M Scott

2011-03-07

The Semantic Web offers an ideal platform for representing and linking biomedical information, which is a prerequisite for the development and application of analytical tools to address problems in data-intensive areas such as systems biology and translational medicine. As for any new paradigm, the adoption of the Semantic Web offers opportunities and poses questions and challenges to the life sciences scientific community: which technologies in the Semantic Web stack will be more beneficial for the life sciences? Is biomedical information too complex to benefit from simple interlinked representations? What are the implications of adopting a new paradigm for knowledge representation? What are the incentives for the adoption of the Semantic Web, and who are the facilitators? Is there going to be a Semantic Web revolution in the life sciences?We report here a few reflections on these questions, following discussions at the SWAT4LS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences) workshop series, of which this Journal of Biomedical Semantics special issue presents selected papers from the 2009 edition, held in Amsterdam on November 20th.

Biomedical engineering strategies in system design space.

Science.gov (United States)

Savageau, Michael A

2011-04-01

Modern systems biology and synthetic bioengineering face two major challenges in relating properties of the genetic components of a natural or engineered system to its integrated behavior. The first is the fundamental unsolved problem of relating the digital representation of the genotype to the analog representation of the parameters for the molecular components. For example, knowing the DNA sequence does not allow one to determine the kinetic parameters of an enzyme. The second is the fundamental unsolved problem of relating the parameters of the components and the environment to the phenotype of the global system. For example, knowing the parameters does not tell one how many qualitatively distinct phenotypes are in the organism's repertoire or the relative fitness of the phenotypes in different environments. These also are challenges for biomedical engineers as they attempt to develop therapeutic strategies to treat pathology or to redirect normal cellular functions for biotechnological purposes. In this article, the second of these fundamental challenges will be addressed, and the notion of a "system design space" for relating the parameter space of components to the phenotype space of bioengineering systems will be focused upon. First, the concept of a system design space will be motivated by introducing one of its key components from an intuitive perspective. Second, a simple linear example will be used to illustrate a generic method for constructing the design space in which qualitatively distinct phenotypes can be identified and counted, their fitness analyzed and compared, and their tolerance to change measured. Third, two examples of nonlinear systems from different areas of biomedical engineering will be presented. Finally, after giving reference to a few other applications that have made use of the system design space approach to reveal important design principles, some concluding remarks concerning challenges and opportunities for further development

PASSIM – an open source software system for managing information in biomedical studies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Neogi Sudeshna

2007-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background One of the crucial aspects of day-to-day laboratory information management is collection, storage and retrieval of information about research subjects and biomedical samples. An efficient link between sample data and experiment results is absolutely imperative for a successful outcome of a biomedical study. Currently available software solutions are largely limited to large-scale, expensive commercial Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS. Acquiring such LIMS indeed can bring laboratory information management to a higher level, but often implies sufficient investment of time, effort and funds, which are not always available. There is a clear need for lightweight open source systems for patient and sample information management. Results We present a web-based tool for submission, management and retrieval of sample and research subject data. The system secures confidentiality by separating anonymized sample information from individuals' records. It is simple and generic, and can be customised for various biomedical studies. Information can be both entered and accessed using the same web interface. User groups and their privileges can be defined. The system is open-source and is supplied with an on-line tutorial and necessary documentation. It has proven to be successful in a large international collaborative project. Conclusion The presented system closes the gap between the need and the availability of lightweight software solutions for managing information in biomedical studies involving human research subjects.

Applications of systems science in biomedical research regarding obesity and noncommunicable chronic diseases: opportunities, promise, and challenges.

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Youfa; Xue, Hong; Liu, Shiyong

2015-01-01

Interest in the application of systems science (SS) in biomedical research, particularly regarding obesity and noncommunicable chronic disease (NCD) research, has been growing rapidly over the past decade. SS is a broad term referring to a family of research approaches that include modeling. As an emerging approach being adopted in public health, SS focuses on the complex dynamic interaction between agents (e.g., people) and subsystems defined at different levels. SS provides a conceptual framework for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that address complex problems. SS has unique advantages for studying obesity and NCD problems in comparison to the traditional analytic approaches. The application of SS in biomedical research dates back to the 1960s with the development of computing capacity and simulation software. In recent decades, SS has been applied to addressing the growing global obesity epidemic. There is growing appreciation and support for using SS in the public health field, with many promising opportunities. There are also many challenges and uncertainties, including methodologic, funding, and institutional barriers. Integrated efforts by stakeholders that address these challenges are critical for the successful application of SS in the future. © 2015 American Society for Nutrition.

A low-cost biomedical signal transceiver based on a Bluetooth wireless system.

Science.gov (United States)

Fazel-Rezai, Reza; Pauls, Mark; Slawinski, David

2007-01-01

Most current wireless biomedical signal transceivers use range-limiting communication. This work presents a low-cost biomedical signal transceiver that uses Bluetooth wireless technology. The design is implemented in a modular form to be adaptable to different types of biomedical signals. The signal front end obtains and processes incoming signals, which are then transmitted via a microcontroller and wireless module. Near real-time receive software in LabVIEW was developed to demonstrate the system capability. The completed transmitter prototype successfully transmits ECG signals, and is able to simultaneously send multiple signals. The sampling rate of the transmitter is fast enough to send up to thirteen ECG signals simultaneously, with an error rate below 0.1% for transmission exceeding 65 meters. A low-cost wireless biomedical transceiver has many applications, such as real-time monitoring of patients with a known condition in non-clinical settings.

Organization of Biomedical Data for Collaborative Scientific Research: A Research Information Management System.

Science.gov (United States)

Myneni, Sahiti; Patel, Vimla L

2010-06-01

Biomedical researchers often work with massive, detailed and heterogeneous datasets. These datasets raise new challenges of information organization and management for scientific interpretation, as they demand much of the researchers' time and attention. The current study investigated the nature of the problems that researchers face when dealing with such data. Four major problems identified with existing biomedical scientific information management methods were related to data organization, data sharing, collaboration, and publications. Therefore, there is a compelling need to develop an efficient and user-friendly information management system to handle the biomedical research data. This study evaluated the implementation of an information management system, which was introduced as part of the collaborative research to increase scientific productivity in a research laboratory. Laboratory members seemed to exhibit frustration during the implementation process. However, empirical findings revealed that they gained new knowledge and completed specified tasks while working together with the new system. Hence, researchers are urged to persist and persevere when dealing with any new technology, including an information management system in a research laboratory environment.

SOA-BD: Service Oriented Architecture for Biomedical Devices

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

João Marcos Teixeira Lacerda

2017-05-01

Full Text Available Introduction: The communication of information systems with biomedical devices has become complex not only due to the existence of several private communication protocols, but also to the immutable way that software is embedded into these devices. In this sense, this paper proposes a service-oriented architecture to access biomedical devices as a way to abstract the mechanisms of writing and reading data from these devices, thus contributing to enable the focus of the development team of biomedical software to be intended for its functional requirements, i.e. business rules relevant to the problem domain. Methods The SOA-BD architecture consists of five main components: A Web Service for transport and conversion of the device data, Communication Protocols to access the devices, Data Parsers to preprocess data, a Device Repository to store data and transmitted information and Error handling, for error handling of these information. For the development of SOA-BD, technologies such as the XML language and the Java programming language were used. Besides, Software Engineering concepts such as Design Patterns were also used. For the validation of this work, data has been collected from vital sign monitors in an Intensive Care Unit using HL7 standards. Results The tests obtained a difference of about only 1 second in terms of response time with the use of SOA-BD. Conclusion SOA-BD achieves important results such as the reduction on the access protocol complexity, the opportunity for treating patients over long distances, allowing easier development of monitoring applications and interoperability with biomedical devices from diverse manufacturers.

A new visual navigation system for exploring biomedical Open Educational Resource (OER) videos.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Baoquan; Xu, Songhua; Lin, Shujin; Luo, Xiaonan; Duan, Lian

2016-04-01

Biomedical videos as open educational resources (OERs) are increasingly proliferating on the Internet. Unfortunately, seeking personally valuable content from among the vast corpus of quality yet diverse OER videos is nontrivial due to limitations of today's keyword- and content-based video retrieval techniques. To address this need, this study introduces a novel visual navigation system that facilitates users' information seeking from biomedical OER videos in mass quantity by interactively offering visual and textual navigational clues that are both semantically revealing and user-friendly. The authors collected and processed around 25 000 YouTube videos, which collectively last for a total length of about 4000 h, in the broad field of biomedical sciences for our experiment. For each video, its semantic clues are first extracted automatically through computationally analyzing audio and visual signals, as well as text either accompanying or embedded in the video. These extracted clues are subsequently stored in a metadata database and indexed by a high-performance text search engine. During the online retrieval stage, the system renders video search results as dynamic web pages using a JavaScript library that allows users to interactively and intuitively explore video content both efficiently and effectively.ResultsThe authors produced a prototype implementation of the proposed system, which is publicly accessible athttps://patentq.njit.edu/oer To examine the overall advantage of the proposed system for exploring biomedical OER videos, the authors further conducted a user study of a modest scale. The study results encouragingly demonstrate the functional effectiveness and user-friendliness of the new system for facilitating information seeking from and content exploration among massive biomedical OER videos. Using the proposed tool, users can efficiently and effectively find videos of interest, precisely locate video segments delivering personally valuable

Characterizing semantic mappings adaptation via biomedical KOS evolution: a case study investigating SNOMED CT and ICD.

Science.gov (United States)

Dos Reis, Julio Cesar; Pruski, Cédric; Da Silveira, Marcos; Reynaud-Delaître, Chantal

2013-01-01

Mappings established between Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) increase semantic interoperability between biomedical information systems. However, biomedical knowledge is highly dynamic and changes affecting KOS entities can potentially invalidate part or the totality of existing mappings. Understanding how mappings evolve and what the impacts of KOS evolution on mappings are is therefore crucial for the definition of an automatic approach to maintain mappings valid and up-to-date over time. In this article, we study variations of a specific KOS complex change (split) for two biomedical KOS (SNOMED CT and ICD-9-CM) through a rigorous method of investigation for identifying and refining complex changes, and for selecting representative cases. We empirically analyze and explain their influence on the evolution of associated mappings. Results point out the importance of considering various dimensions of the information described in KOS, like the semantic structure of concepts, the set of relevant information used to define the mappings and the change operations interfering with this set of information.

[The system of protection of scientific biomedical research participants in France and in Poland].

Science.gov (United States)

Czarkowski, Marek; Sieczych, Alicja

2013-07-01

Realizing scientific biomedical research conducted on human-beings demands obeying ample ethical rules. However, states keep independence in the means of implementing deontological guidelines to legislative acts. The aim of the article is to compare rules of law relative to protection of scientific biomedical research participants in two European Union member states--France and Poland. French regulations cover more types of scientific biomedical research than those in Poland. In France almost all types of interventional scientific biomedical research including research on human biological samples and research on cosmetics are covered by the rules of law. Polish regulations are limited to interventional research conducted by doctors and dentists. In both states projects of clinical trials of medicinal products demands double acceptance - from bioethics committee and from competent state authority. In protection of scientific biomedical research participants the role of state authority competent for personal data is more vital in France than it is in Poland. In France there is also National Ethics Advisory Committee whereas in Poland there is no such institution. The systems protecting scientific biomedical research participants differs therefore in both states in many vital aspects and French measures cover more types of scientific biomedical research, hence the level of participants protection in various types of research is more equitable.

Advances in biomedical engineering

CERN Document Server

Brown, J H U

1976-01-01

Advances in Biomedical Engineering, Volume 6, is a collection of papers that discusses the role of integrated electronics in medical systems and the usage of biological mathematical models in biological systems. Other papers deal with the health care systems, the problems and methods of approach toward rehabilitation, as well as the future of biomedical engineering. One paper discusses the use of system identification as it applies to biological systems to estimate the values of a number of parameters (for example, resistance, diffusion coefficients) by indirect means. More particularly, the i

Image BOSS: a biomedical object storage system

Science.gov (United States)

Stacy, Mahlon C.; Augustine, Kurt E.; Robb, Richard A.

1997-05-01

Researchers using biomedical images have data management needs which are oriented perpendicular to clinical PACS. The image BOSS system is designed to permit researchers to organize and select images based on research topic, image metadata, and a thumbnail of the image. Image information is captured from existing images in a Unix based filesystem, stored in an object oriented database, and presented to the user in a familiar laboratory notebook metaphor. In addition, the ImageBOSS is designed to provide an extensible infrastructure for future content-based queries directly on the images.

Education of biomedical engineering in Taiwan.

Science.gov (United States)

Lin, Kang-Ping; Kao, Tsair; Wang, Jia-Jung; Chen, Mei-Jung; Su, Fong-Chin

2014-01-01

Biomedical Engineers (BME) play an important role in medical and healthcare society. Well educational programs are important to support the healthcare systems including hospitals, long term care organizations, manufacture industries of medical devices/instrumentations/systems, and sales/services companies of medical devices/instrumentations/system. In past 30 more years, biomedical engineering society has accumulated thousands people hold a biomedical engineering degree, and work as a biomedical engineer in Taiwan. Most of BME students can be trained in biomedical engineering departments with at least one of specialties in bioelectronics, bio-information, biomaterials or biomechanics. Students are required to have internship trainings in related institutions out of campus for 320 hours before graduating. Almost all the biomedical engineering departments are certified by IEET (Institute of Engineering Education Taiwan), and met the IEET requirement in which required mathematics and fundamental engineering courses. For BMEs after graduation, Taiwanese Society of Biomedical Engineering (TSBME) provides many continue-learning programs and certificates for all members who expect to hold the certification as a professional credit in his working place. In current status, many engineering departments in university are continuously asked to provide joint programs with BME department to train much better quality students. BME is one of growing fields in Taiwan.

A Relation Extraction Framework for Biomedical Text Using Hybrid Feature Set

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Abdul Wahab Muzaffar

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The information extraction from unstructured text segments is a complex task. Although manual information extraction often produces the best results, it is harder to manage biomedical data extraction manually because of the exponential increase in data size. Thus, there is a need for automatic tools and techniques for information extraction in biomedical text mining. Relation extraction is a significant area under biomedical information extraction that has gained much importance in the last two decades. A lot of work has been done on biomedical relation extraction focusing on rule-based and machine learning techniques. In the last decade, the focus has changed to hybrid approaches showing better results. This research presents a hybrid feature set for classification of relations between biomedical entities. The main contribution of this research is done in the semantic feature set where verb phrases are ranked using Unified Medical Language System (UMLS and a ranking algorithm. Support Vector Machine and Naïve Bayes, the two effective machine learning techniques, are used to classify these relations. Our approach has been validated on the standard biomedical text corpus obtained from MEDLINE 2001. Conclusively, it can be articulated that our framework outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches used for relation extraction on the same corpus.

High-Definition 3D Stereoscopic Microscope Display System for Biomedical Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yoo Kwan-Hee

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Biomedical research has been performed by using advanced information techniques, and micro-high-quality stereo images have been used by researchers and/or doctors for various aims in biomedical research and surgery. To visualize the stereo images, many related devices have been developed. However, the devices are difficult to learn for junior doctors and demanding to supervise for experienced surgeons. In this paper, we describe the development of a high-definition (HD three-dimensional (3D stereoscopic imaging display system for operating a microscope or experimenting on animals. The system consists of a stereoscopic camera part, image processing device for stereoscopic video recording, and stereoscopic display. In order to reduce eyestrain and viewer fatigue, we use a preexisting stereo microscope structure and polarized-light stereoscopic display method that does not reduce the quality of the stereo images. The developed system can overcome the discomfort of the eye piece and eyestrain caused by use over a long period of time.

Advanced Methods of Biomedical Signal Processing

CERN Document Server

Cerutti, Sergio

2011-01-01

This book grew out of the IEEE-EMBS Summer Schools on Biomedical Signal Processing, which have been held annually since 2002 to provide the participants state-of-the-art knowledge on emerging areas in biomedical engineering. Prominent experts in the areas of biomedical signal processing, biomedical data treatment, medicine, signal processing, system biology, and applied physiology introduce novel techniques and algorithms as well as their clinical or physiological applications. The book provides an overview of a compelling group of advanced biomedical signal processing techniques, such as mult

A System for Information Management in BioMedical Studies—SIMBioMS

Science.gov (United States)

Krestyaninova, Maria; Zarins, Andris; Viksna, Juris; Kurbatova, Natalja; Rucevskis, Peteris; Neogi, Sudeshna Guha; Gostev, Mike; Perheentupa, Teemu; Knuuttila, Juha; Barrett, Amy; Lappalainen, Ilkka; Rung, Johan; Podnieks, Karlis; Sarkans, Ugis; McCarthy, Mark I; Brazma, Alvis

2009-01-01

Summary: SIMBioMS is a web-based open source software system for managing data and information in biomedical studies. It provides a solution for the collection, storage, management and retrieval of information about research subjects and biomedical samples, as well as experimental data obtained using a range of high-throughput technologies, including gene expression, genotyping, proteomics and metabonomics. The system can easily be customized and has proven to be successful in several large-scale multi-site collaborative projects. It is compatible with emerging functional genomics data standards and provides data import and export in accepted standard formats. Protocols for transferring data to durable archives at the European Bioinformatics Institute have been implemented. Availability: The source code, documentation and initialization scripts are available at http://simbioms.org. Contact: support@simbioms.org; mariak@ebi.ac.uk PMID:19633095

Convergence of Terahertz Sciences in Biomedical Systems

CERN Document Server

Kim, Yong; Han, Haewook; Han, Joon; Ahn, Jaewook; Son, Joo-Hiuk; Park, Woong-Yang; Jeong, Young

2012-01-01

Recent technological breakthrough in the field of Terahertz radiation has triggered new applications in biology and biomedicine. Particularly, biological applications are based on the specific spectroscopic fingerprints of biological matter in this spectral region. Historically with the discovery of new electromagnetic wave spectrum, we have always discovered new medical diagnostic imaging systems. The use of terahertz wave was not realized due to the absence of useful terahertz sources. Now after successful generation of THz waves, it is reported that a great potential for THz wave exists for its resonance with bio-molecules. There are many challenging issues such as development of THz passive and active instrumentations, understanding of THz-Bio interaction for THz spectroscopy, THz-Bio nonlinear phenomena and safety guideline, and THz imaging systems. Eventually the deeper understanding of THz-Bio interaction and novel THz systems enable us to develop powerful THz biomedical imaging systems which can contr...

From the NIH: A Systems Approach to Increasing the Diversity of the Biomedical Research Workforce

Science.gov (United States)

Valantine, Hannah A.; Lund, P. Kay; Gammie, Alison E.

2016-01-01

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is committed to attracting, developing, and supporting the best scientists from all groups as an integral part of excellence in training. Biomedical research workforce diversity, capitalizing on the full spectrum of skills, talents, and viewpoints, is essential for solving complex human health challenges.…

Digital fabrication of multi-material biomedical objects

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Cheung, H H; Choi, S H, E-mail: shchoi@hku.h [Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road (Hong Kong)

2009-12-15

This paper describes a multi-material virtual prototyping (MMVP) system for modelling and digital fabrication of discrete and functionally graded multi-material objects for biomedical applications. The MMVP system consists of a DMMVP module, an FGMVP module and a virtual reality (VR) simulation module. The DMMVP module is used to model discrete multi-material (DMM) objects, while the FGMVP module is for functionally graded multi-material (FGM) objects. The VR simulation module integrates these two modules to perform digital fabrication of multi-material objects, which can be subsequently visualized and analysed in a virtual environment to optimize MMLM processes for fabrication of product prototypes. Using the MMVP system, two biomedical objects, including a DMM human spine and an FGM intervertebral disc spacer are modelled and digitally fabricated for visualization and analysis in a VR environment. These studies show that the MMVP system is a practical tool for modelling, visualization, and subsequent fabrication of biomedical objects of discrete and functionally graded multi-materials for biomedical applications. The system may be adapted to control MMLM machines with appropriate hardware for physical fabrication of biomedical objects.

Digital fabrication of multi-material biomedical objects

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cheung, H H; Choi, S H

2009-01-01

This paper describes a multi-material virtual prototyping (MMVP) system for modelling and digital fabrication of discrete and functionally graded multi-material objects for biomedical applications. The MMVP system consists of a DMMVP module, an FGMVP module and a virtual reality (VR) simulation module. The DMMVP module is used to model discrete multi-material (DMM) objects, while the FGMVP module is for functionally graded multi-material (FGM) objects. The VR simulation module integrates these two modules to perform digital fabrication of multi-material objects, which can be subsequently visualized and analysed in a virtual environment to optimize MMLM processes for fabrication of product prototypes. Using the MMVP system, two biomedical objects, including a DMM human spine and an FGM intervertebral disc spacer are modelled and digitally fabricated for visualization and analysis in a VR environment. These studies show that the MMVP system is a practical tool for modelling, visualization, and subsequent fabrication of biomedical objects of discrete and functionally graded multi-materials for biomedical applications. The system may be adapted to control MMLM machines with appropriate hardware for physical fabrication of biomedical objects.

Method for detecting core malware sites related to biomedical information systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Dohoon; Choi, Donghee; Jin, Jonghyun

2015-01-01

Most advanced persistent threat attacks target web users through malicious code within landing (exploit) or distribution sites. There is an urgent need to block the affected websites. Attacks on biomedical information systems are no exception to this issue. In this paper, we present a method for locating malicious websites that attempt to attack biomedical information systems. Our approach uses malicious code crawling to rearrange websites in the order of their risk index by analyzing the centrality between malware sites and proactively eliminates the root of these sites by finding the core-hub node, thereby reducing unnecessary security policies. In particular, we dynamically estimate the risk index of the affected websites by analyzing various centrality measures and converting them into a single quantified vector. On average, the proactive elimination of core malicious websites results in an average improvement in zero-day attack detection of more than 20%.

Method for Detecting Core Malware Sites Related to Biomedical Information Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dohoon Kim

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Most advanced persistent threat attacks target web users through malicious code within landing (exploit or distribution sites. There is an urgent need to block the affected websites. Attacks on biomedical information systems are no exception to this issue. In this paper, we present a method for locating malicious websites that attempt to attack biomedical information systems. Our approach uses malicious code crawling to rearrange websites in the order of their risk index by analyzing the centrality between malware sites and proactively eliminates the root of these sites by finding the core-hub node, thereby reducing unnecessary security policies. In particular, we dynamically estimate the risk index of the affected websites by analyzing various centrality measures and converting them into a single quantified vector. On average, the proactive elimination of core malicious websites results in an average improvement in zero-day attack detection of more than 20%.

Views on the peer review system of biomedical journals: an online survey of academics from high-ranking universities

Science.gov (United States)

2013-01-01

Background Peer review is the major method used by biomedical journals for making the decision of publishing an article. This cross-sectional survey assesses views concerning the review system of biomedical journals among academics globally. Methods A total of 28,009 biomedical academics from high-ranking universities listed by the 2009 Times Higher Education Quacquarelli Symonds (THE-QS) World University Rankings were contacted by email between March 2010 and August 2010. 1,340 completed an online survey which focused on their academic background, negative experiences and views on biomedical journal peer review and the results were compared among basic scientists, clinicians and clinician scientists. Results Fewer than half of the respondents agreed that the peer review systems of biomedical journals were fair (48.4%), scientific (47.5%), or transparent (25.1%). Nevertheless, 58.2% of the respondents agreed that authors should remain anonymous and 64.4% agreed that reviewers should not be disclosed. Most, (67.7%) agreed to the establishment of an appeal system. The proportion of native English-speaking respondents who agreed that the “peer review system is fair” was significantly higher than for non-native respondents (p = 0.02). Similarly, the proportion of clinicians stating that the “peer review system is fair” was significantly higher than that for basic scientists and clinician-scientists (p = 0.004). For females, (β = −0.1, p = 0.03), the frequency of encountering personal attacks in reviewers’ comments (β = −0.1, p = 0.002) and the frequency of imposition of unnecessary references by reviewers (β = −0.06, p = 0.04) were independently and inversely associated with agreement that “the peer review system is fair”. Conclusion Academics are divided on the issue of whether the biomedical journal peer review system is fair, scientific and transparent. A majority of academics agreed with the double-blind peer

Technology for 3D System Integration for Flexible Wireless Biomedical Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wen-Cheng Kuo

2018-05-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a new 3D bottom-up packing technology for integrating a chip, an induction coil, and interconnections for flexible wireless biomedical applications. Parylene was used as a flexible substrate for the bottom-up embedding of the chip, insulation layer, interconnection, and inductors to form a flexible wireless biomedical microsystem. The system can be implanted on or inside the human body. A 50-μm gold foil deposited through laser micromachining by using a picosecond laser was used as an inductor to yield a higher quality factor than that yielded by thickness-increasing methods such as the fold-and-bond method or thick-metal electroplating method at the operation frequency of 1 MHz. For system integration, parylene was used as a flexible substrate, and the contact pads and connections between the coil and chip were generated using gold deposition. The advantage of the proposed process can integrate the chip and coil vertically to generate a single biocompatible system in order to reduce required area. The proposed system entails the use of 3D integrated circuit packaging concepts to integrate the chip and coil. The results validated the feasibility of this technology.

Distributed System for Spaceflight Biomedical Support

Data.gov (United States)

National Aeronautics and Space Administration — Our project investigated whether a software platform could integrate as wide a variety of devices and data types as needed for spaceflight biomedical support. The...

Functionalized carbon nanotubes: biomedical applications

Science.gov (United States)

Vardharajula, Sandhya; Ali, Sk Z; Tiwari, Pooja M; Eroğlu, Erdal; Vig, Komal; Dennis, Vida A; Singh, Shree R

2012-01-01

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are emerging as novel nanomaterials for various biomedical applications. CNTs can be used to deliver a variety of therapeutic agents, including biomolecules, to the target disease sites. In addition, their unparalleled optical and electrical properties make them excellent candidates for bioimaging and other biomedical applications. However, the high cytotoxicity of CNTs limits their use in humans and many biological systems. The biocompatibility and low cytotoxicity of CNTs are attributed to size, dose, duration, testing systems, and surface functionalization. The functionalization of CNTs improves their solubility and biocompatibility and alters their cellular interaction pathways, resulting in much-reduced cytotoxic effects. Functionalized CNTs are promising novel materials for a variety of biomedical applications. These potential applications are particularly enhanced by their ability to penetrate biological membranes with relatively low cytotoxicity. This review is directed towards the overview of CNTs and their functionalization for biomedical applications with minimal cytotoxicity. PMID:23091380

User needs analysis and usability assessment of DataMed - a biomedical data discovery index.

Science.gov (United States)

Dixit, Ram; Rogith, Deevakar; Narayana, Vidya; Salimi, Mandana; Gururaj, Anupama; Ohno-Machado, Lucila; Xu, Hua; Johnson, Todd R

2017-11-30

To present user needs and usability evaluations of DataMed, a Data Discovery Index (DDI) that allows searching for biomedical data from multiple sources. We conducted 2 phases of user studies. Phase 1 was a user needs analysis conducted before the development of DataMed, consisting of interviews with researchers. Phase 2 involved iterative usability evaluations of DataMed prototypes. We analyzed data qualitatively to document researchers' information and user interface needs. Biomedical researchers' information needs in data discovery are complex, multidimensional, and shaped by their context, domain knowledge, and technical experience. User needs analyses validate the need for a DDI, while usability evaluations of DataMed show that even though aggregating metadata into a common search engine and applying traditional information retrieval tools are promising first steps, there remain challenges for DataMed due to incomplete metadata and the complexity of data discovery. Biomedical data poses distinct problems for search when compared to websites or publications. Making data available is not enough to facilitate biomedical data discovery: new retrieval techniques and user interfaces are necessary for dataset exploration. Consistent, complete, and high-quality metadata are vital to enable this process. While available data and researchers' information needs are complex and heterogeneous, a successful DDI must meet those needs and fit into the processes of biomedical researchers. Research directions include formalizing researchers' information needs, standardizing overviews of data to facilitate relevance judgments, implementing user interfaces for concept-based searching, and developing evaluation methods for open-ended discovery systems such as DDIs. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

Biomedical Engineering

CERN Document Server

Suh, Sang C; Tanik, Murat M

2011-01-01

Biomedical Engineering: Health Care Systems, Technology and Techniques is an edited volume with contributions from world experts. It provides readers with unique contributions related to current research and future healthcare systems. Practitioners and researchers focused on computer science, bioinformatics, engineering and medicine will find this book a valuable reference.

Advances in biomedical engineering

CERN Document Server

Brown, J H U

1976-01-01

Advances in Biomedical Engineering, Volume 5, is a collection of papers that deals with application of the principles and practices of engineering to basic and applied biomedical research, development, and the delivery of health care. The papers also describe breakthroughs in health improvements, as well as basic research that have been accomplished through clinical applications. One paper examines engineering principles and practices that can be applied in developing therapeutic systems by a controlled delivery system in drug dosage. Another paper examines the physiological and materials vari

CNN-based ranking for biomedical entity normalization.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Haodi; Chen, Qingcai; Tang, Buzhou; Wang, Xiaolong; Xu, Hua; Wang, Baohua; Huang, Dong

2017-10-03

Most state-of-the-art biomedical entity normalization systems, such as rule-based systems, merely rely on morphological information of entity mentions, but rarely consider their semantic information. In this paper, we introduce a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that regards biomedical entity normalization as a ranking problem and benefits from semantic information of biomedical entities. The CNN-based ranking method first generates candidates using handcrafted rules, and then ranks the candidates according to their semantic information modeled by CNN as well as their morphological information. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for biomedical entity normalization show that our proposed CNN-based ranking method outperforms traditional rule-based method with state-of-the-art performance. We propose a CNN architecture that regards biomedical entity normalization as a ranking problem. Comparison results show that semantic information is beneficial to biomedical entity normalization and can be well combined with morphological information in our CNN architecture for further improvement.

Advances in electronic-nose technologies developed for biomedical applications

Science.gov (United States)

Dan Wilson; Manuela. Baietto

2011-01-01

The research and development of new electronic-nose applications in the biomedical field has accelerated at a phenomenal rate over the past 25 years. Many innovative e-nose technologies have provided solutions and applications to a wide variety of complex biomedical and healthcare problems. The purposes of this review are to present a comprehensive analysis of past and...

Implementation and management of a biomedical observation dictionary in a large healthcare information system.

Science.gov (United States)

Vandenbussche, Pierre-Yves; Cormont, Sylvie; André, Christophe; Daniel, Christel; Delahousse, Jean; Charlet, Jean; Lepage, Eric

2013-01-01

This study shows the evolution of a biomedical observation dictionary within the Assistance Publique Hôpitaux Paris (AP-HP), the largest European university hospital group. The different steps are detailed as follows: the dictionary creation, the mapping to logical observation identifier names and codes (LOINC), the integration into a multiterminological management platform and, finally, the implementation in the health information system. AP-HP decided to create a biomedical observation dictionary named AnaBio, to map it to LOINC and to maintain the mapping. A management platform based on methods used for knowledge engineering has been put in place. It aims at integrating AnaBio within the health information system and improving both the quality and stability of the dictionary. This new management platform is now active in AP-HP. The AnaBio dictionary is shared by 120 laboratories and currently includes 50 000 codes. The mapping implementation to LOINC reaches 40% of the AnaBio entries and uses 26% of LOINC records. The results of our work validate the choice made to develop a local dictionary aligned with LOINC. This work constitutes a first step towards a wider use of the platform. The next step will support the entire biomedical production chain, from the clinician prescription, through laboratory tests tracking in the laboratory information system to the communication of results and the use for decision support and biomedical research. In addition, the increase in the mapping implementation to LOINC ensures the interoperability allowing communication with other international health institutions.

Biomedical Engineering Education in Perspective

Science.gov (United States)

Gowen, Richard J.

1973-01-01

Discusses recent developments in the health care industry and their impact on the future of biomedical engineering education. Indicates that a more thorough understanding of the complex functions of the living organism can be acquired through the application of engineering techniques to problems of life sciences. (CC)

Biomedical Optical Imaging Technologies Design and Applications

CERN Document Server

2013-01-01

This book provides an introduction to design of biomedical optical imaging technologies and their applications. The main topics include: fluorescence imaging, confocal imaging, micro-endoscope, polarization imaging, hyperspectral imaging, OCT imaging, multimodal imaging and spectroscopic systems. Each chapter is written by the world leaders of the respective fields, and will cover: principles and limitations of optical imaging technology, system design and practical implementation for one or two specific applications, including design guidelines, system configuration, optical design, component requirements and selection, system optimization and design examples, recent advances and applications in biomedical researches and clinical imaging. This book serves as a reference for students and researchers in optics and biomedical engineering.

Biomedical Visual Computing: Case Studies and Challenges

KAUST Repository

Johnson, Christopher

2012-01-01

Advances in computational geometric modeling, imaging, and simulation let researchers build and test models of increasing complexity, generating unprecedented amounts of data. As recent research in biomedical applications illustrates, visualization will be critical in making this vast amount of data usable; it's also fundamental to understanding models of complex phenomena. © 2012 IEEE.

An ultra low energy biomedical signal processing system operating at near-threshold

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hulzink, J.; Konijnenburg, M.; Ashouei, M.; Breeschoten, A.; Berset, T.; Huisken, J.; Stuyt, J.; Groot, H. de; Barat, F.; David, J.; Ginderdeuren, J. van

2011-01-01

This paper presents a voltage-scalable digital signal processing system designed for the use in a wireless sensor node (WSN) for ambulatory monitoring of biomedical signals. To fulfill the requirements of ambulatory monitoring, power consumption, which directly translates to the WSN battery lifetime

Synthetic biology: programming cells for biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Hörner, Maximilian; Reischmann, Nadine; Weber, Wilfried

2012-01-01

The emerging field of synthetic biology is a novel biological discipline at the interface between traditional biology, chemistry, and engineering sciences. Synthetic biology aims at the rational design of complex synthetic biological devices and systems with desired properties by combining compatible, modular biological parts in a systematic manner. While the first engineered systems were mainly proof-of-principle studies to demonstrate the power of the modular engineering approach of synthetic biology, subsequent systems focus on applications in the health, environmental, and energy sectors. This review describes recent approaches for biomedical applications that were developed along the synthetic biology design hierarchy, at the level of individual parts, of devices, and of complex multicellular systems. It describes how synthetic biological parts can be used for the synthesis of drug-delivery tools, how synthetic biological devices can facilitate the discovery of novel drugs, and how multicellular synthetic ecosystems can give insight into population dynamics of parasites and hosts. These examples demonstrate how this new discipline could contribute to novel solutions in the biopharmaceutical industry.

DyKOSMap: A framework for mapping adaptation between biomedical knowledge organization systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Dos Reis, Julio Cesar; Pruski, Cédric; Da Silveira, Marcos; Reynaud-Delaître, Chantal

2015-06-01

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) and their associated mappings play a central role in several decision support systems. However, by virtue of knowledge evolution, KOS entities are modified over time, impacting mappings and potentially turning them invalid. This requires semi-automatic methods to maintain such semantic correspondences up-to-date at KOS evolution time. We define a complete and original framework based on formal heuristics that drives the adaptation of KOS mappings. Our approach takes into account the definition of established mappings, the evolution of KOS and the possible changes that can be applied to mappings. This study experimentally evaluates the proposed heuristics and the entire framework on realistic case studies borrowed from the biomedical domain, using official mappings between several biomedical KOSs. We demonstrate the overall performance of the approach over biomedical datasets of different characteristics and sizes. Our findings reveal the effectiveness in terms of precision, recall and F-measure of the suggested heuristics and methods defining the framework to adapt mappings affected by KOS evolution. The obtained results contribute and improve the quality of mappings over time. The proposed framework can adapt mappings largely automatically, facilitating thus the maintenance task. The implemented algorithms and tools support and minimize the work of users in charge of KOS mapping maintenance. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

International biomedical law in search for its normative status.

Science.gov (United States)

Krajewska, Atina

2012-01-01

The broad and multifaceted problem of global health law and global health governance has been attracting increasing attention in the last few decades. The global community has failed to establish international legal regime that deals comprehensively with the 'technological revolution'. The latter has posed complex questions to regions of the world with widely differing cultural perspectives. At the same time, an increasing number of governmental and non-state actors have become significantly involved in the sector. They use legal, political, and other forms of decision-making that result in regulatory instruments of contrasting normative status. Law created in this heterogeneous environment has been said to be fragmented, inconsistent, and exacerbating uncertainties. Therefore, claims have been made that a centralised and institutionalised system would help address the problems of transparency, legitimacy and efficiency. Nevertheless, little scholarly consideration is paid to the normative status of international biomedical law. This paper explores whether formalisation and "constitutionalisation" of biomedical law are indeed inevitable for its establishment as a separate regulatory regime. It does so by analysing the proliferation of biomedical law in light of two the theory of fragmentation and the theory of global legal pluralism. Investigating the problem in this way helps determine the theoretical framework and methodology of future studies of biomedical law at the international level. This in turn should help its future development in a more consistent and harmonised manner.

Biomedical Visual Computing: Case Studies and Challenges

KAUST Repository

Johnson, Christopher

2012-01-01

Advances in computational geometric modeling, imaging, and simulation let researchers build and test models of increasing complexity, generating unprecedented amounts of data. As recent research in biomedical applications illustrates, visualization will be critical in making this vast amount of data usable; it\\'s also fundamental to understanding models of complex phenomena. © 2012 IEEE.

Discrete-Time Biomedical Signal Encryption

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Victor Grigoraş

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Chaotic modulation is a strong method of improving communication security. Analog and discrete chaotic systems are presented in actual literature. Due to the expansion of digital communication, discrete-time systems become more efficient and closer to actual technology. The present contribution offers an in-depth analysis of the effects chaos encryption produce on 1D and 2D biomedical signals. The performed simulations show that modulating signals are precisely recovered by the synchronizing receiver if discrete systems are digitally implemented and the coefficients precisely correspond. Channel noise is also applied and its effects on biomedical signal demodulation are highlighted.

Biomedical effects of low-power laser controlled by electroacupuncture

Science.gov (United States)

Kalenchits, Nadezhda I.; Nicolaenko, Andrej A.; Shpilevoj, Boris N.

1997-12-01

The methods and technical facilities of testing the biomedical effects caused by the influence of low-power laser radiation in the process of laser therapy are presented. Described studies have been conducted by means of the complex of fireware facilities consisting of the system of electroacupuncture diagnostics (EA) and a system of laser therapy on the basis of multichannel laser and magneto-laser devices. The task of laser therapy was concluded in undertaking acupuncture anaesthetization, achievement of antioedemic and dispersional actions, raising tone of musculus and nervous system, normalization of immunity factors under the control of system EA. The 82 percent to 95 percent agreement of the result of an electroacupuncture diagnostics with clinical diagnoses were achieved.

Suitability of customer relationship management systems for the management of study participants in biomedical research.

Science.gov (United States)

Schwanke, J; Rienhoff, O; Schulze, T G; Nussbeck, S Y

2013-01-01

Longitudinal biomedical research projects study patients or participants over a course of time. No IT solution is known that can manage study participants, enhance quality of data, support re-contacting of participants, plan study visits, and keep track of informed consent procedures and recruitments that may be subject to change over time. In business settings management of personal is one of the major aspects of customer relationship management systems (CRMS). To evaluate whether CRMS are suitable IT solutions for study participant management in biomedical research. Three boards of experts in the field of biomedical research were consulted to get an insight into recent IT developments regarding study participant management systems (SPMS). Subsequently, a requirements analysis was performed with stakeholders of a major biomedical research project. The successive suitability evaluation was based on the comparison of the identified requirements with the features of six CRMS. Independently of each other, the interviewed expert boards confirmed that there is no generic IT solution for the management of participants. Sixty-four requirements were identified and prioritized in a requirements analysis. The best CRMS was able to fulfill forty-two of these requirements. The non-fulfilled requirements demand an adaption of the CRMS, consuming time and resources, reducing the update compatibility, the system's suitability, and the security of the CRMS. A specific solution for the SPMS is favored instead of a generic and commercially-oriented CRMS. Therefore, the development of a small and specific SPMS solution was commenced and is currently on the way to completion.

Biomedical Imaging Principles and Applications

CERN Document Server

Salzer, Reiner

2012-01-01

This book presents and describes imaging technologies that can be used to study chemical processes and structural interactions in dynamic systems, principally in biomedical systems. The imaging technologies, largely biomedical imaging technologies such as MRT, Fluorescence mapping, raman mapping, nanoESCA, and CARS microscopy, have been selected according to their application range and to the chemical information content of their data. These technologies allow for the analysis and evaluation of delicate biological samples, which must not be disturbed during the profess. Ultimately, this may me

Europium enabled luminescent nanoparticles for biomedical applications

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Syamchand, S.S., E-mail: syamchand.ss@gmail.com; Sony, G., E-mail: emailtosony@gmail.com

2015-09-15

Lanthanide based nanoparticles are receiving great attention ought to their excellent luminescent and magnetic properties and find challenging biomedical applications. Among the luminescent lanthanide NPs, europium based NPs (Eu-NPs) are better candidates for immunoassay and imaging applications. The Eu-NPs have an edge over quantum dots (QDs) by means of their stable luminescence, long fluorescence lifetime, sharp emission peaks with narrow band width, lack of blinking and biocompatibility. This review surveys the synthesis and properties of a variety of Eu-NPs consolidated from different research articles, for their applications in medicine and biology. The exquisite luminescent properties of Eu-NPs are explored for developing biomedical applications such as immunoassay and bioimaging including multimodal imaging. The biomedical applications of Eu-NPs are mostly diagnostic in nature and mainly focus on various key analytes present in biological systems. The luminescent properties of europium enabled NPs are influenced by a number of factors such as the site symmetry, the metal nanoparticles, metal ions, quantum dots, surfactants, morphology of Eu-NPs, crystal defect, phenomena like antenna effect and physical parameters like temperature. Through this review we explore and assimilate all the factors which affect the luminescence in Eu-NPs and coil a new thread of parameters that control the luminescence in Eu-NPs, which would provide further insight in developing Eu-based nanoprobes for future biomedical prospects. - Highlights: • The review describes 14 major factors that influence the luminescence properties of europium enabled luminescent nanoparticles (Eu-NPs). • Surveys different types of europium containing nanoparticles that have been reported for their biomedical applications. • Eu-NPs are conveniently divided into four different categories, based on the type of the substrates involved. The four categories are (1) virgin Eu-substrate based NPs; (2

Europium enabled luminescent nanoparticles for biomedical applications

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Syamchand, S.S.; Sony, G.

2015-01-01

Lanthanide based nanoparticles are receiving great attention ought to their excellent luminescent and magnetic properties and find challenging biomedical applications. Among the luminescent lanthanide NPs, europium based NPs (Eu-NPs) are better candidates for immunoassay and imaging applications. The Eu-NPs have an edge over quantum dots (QDs) by means of their stable luminescence, long fluorescence lifetime, sharp emission peaks with narrow band width, lack of blinking and biocompatibility. This review surveys the synthesis and properties of a variety of Eu-NPs consolidated from different research articles, for their applications in medicine and biology. The exquisite luminescent properties of Eu-NPs are explored for developing biomedical applications such as immunoassay and bioimaging including multimodal imaging. The biomedical applications of Eu-NPs are mostly diagnostic in nature and mainly focus on various key analytes present in biological systems. The luminescent properties of europium enabled NPs are influenced by a number of factors such as the site symmetry, the metal nanoparticles, metal ions, quantum dots, surfactants, morphology of Eu-NPs, crystal defect, phenomena like antenna effect and physical parameters like temperature. Through this review we explore and assimilate all the factors which affect the luminescence in Eu-NPs and coil a new thread of parameters that control the luminescence in Eu-NPs, which would provide further insight in developing Eu-based nanoprobes for future biomedical prospects. - Highlights: • The review describes 14 major factors that influence the luminescence properties of europium enabled luminescent nanoparticles (Eu-NPs). • Surveys different types of europium containing nanoparticles that have been reported for their biomedical applications. • Eu-NPs are conveniently divided into four different categories, based on the type of the substrates involved. The four categories are (1) virgin Eu-substrate based NPs; (2

Development of microfluidic devices for biomedical applications of synchrotron radiation infrared microspectroscopy

OpenAIRE

Birarda, Giovanni

2011-01-01

2009/2010 ABSTRACT DEVELOPMENT OF MICROFLUIDIC DEVICES FOR BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS OF SYNCHROTRON RADIATION INFRARED MICROSPECTROSCOPY by Birarda Giovanni The detection and measurement of biological processes in a complex living system is a discipline at the edge of Physics, Biology, and Engineering, with major scientific challenges, new technological applications and a great potential impact on dissection of phenomena occurring at tissue, cell, and sub cellular level. The ...

Low cost open data acquisition system for biomedical applications

Science.gov (United States)

Zabolotny, Wojciech M.; Laniewski-Wollk, Przemyslaw; Zaworski, Wojciech

2005-09-01

In the biomedical applications it is often necessary to collect measurement data from different devices. It is relatively easy, if the devices are equipped with a MIB or Ethernet interface, however often they feature only the asynchronous serial link, and sometimes the measured values are available only as the analog signals. The system presented in the paper is a low cost alternative to commercially available data acquisition systems. The hardware and software architecture of the system is fully open, so it is possible to customize it for particular needs. The presented system offers various possibilities to connect it to the computer based data processing unit - e.g. using the USB or Ethernet ports. Both interfaces allow also to use many such systems in parallel to increase amount of serial and analog inputs. The open source software used in the system makes possible to process the acquired data with standard tools like MATLAB, Scilab or Octave, or with a dedicated, user supplied application.

Advanced computational approaches to biomedical engineering

CERN Document Server

Saha, Punam K; Basu, Subhadip

2014-01-01

There has been rapid growth in biomedical engineering in recent decades, given advancements in medical imaging and physiological modelling and sensing systems, coupled with immense growth in computational and network technology, analytic approaches, visualization and virtual-reality, man-machine interaction and automation. Biomedical engineering involves applying engineering principles to the medical and biological sciences and it comprises several topics including biomedicine, medical imaging, physiological modelling and sensing, instrumentation, real-time systems, automation and control, sig

Applying systems biology to biomedical research and health care: a précising definition of systems medicine.

Science.gov (United States)

Schleidgen, Sebastian; Fernau, Sandra; Fleischer, Henrike; Schickhardt, Christoph; Oßa, Ann-Kristin; Winkler, Eva C

2017-11-21

Systems medicine has become a key word in biomedical research. Although it is often referred to as P4-(predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory)-medicine, it still lacks a clear definition and is open to interpretation. This conceptual lack of clarity complicates the scientific and public discourse on chances, risks and limits of Systems Medicine and may lead to unfounded hopes. Against this background, our goal was to develop a sufficiently precise and widely acceptable definition of Systems Medicine. In a first step, PubMed was searched using the keyword "systems medicine". A data extraction tabloid was developed putting forward a means/ends-division. Full-texts of articles containing Systems Medicine in title or abstract were screened for definitions. Definitions were extracted; their semantic elements were assigned as either means or ends. To reduce complexity of the resulting list, summary categories were developed inductively. In a second step, we applied six criteria for adequate definitions (necessity, non-circularity, non-redundancy, consistency, non-vagueness, and coherence) to these categories to derive a so-called précising definition of Systems Medicine. We identified 185 articles containing the term Systems Medicine in title or abstract. 67 contained at least one definition of Systems Medicine. In 98 definitions, we found 114 means and 132 ends. From these we derived the précising definition: Systems Medicine is an approach seeking to improve medical research (i.e. the understanding of complex processes occurring in diseases, pathologies and health states as well as innovative approaches to drug discovery) and health care (i.e. prevention, prediction, diagnosis and treatment) through stratification by means of Systems Biology (i.e. data integration, modeling, experimentation and bioinformatics). Our study also revealed the visionary character of Systems Medicine. Our insights, on the one hand, allow for a realistic identification of

Exploring subdomain variation in biomedical language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Séaghdha Diarmuid Ó

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP technology to biomedical texts have generated significant interest in recent years. In this paper we identify and investigate the phenomenon of linguistic subdomain variation within the biomedical domain, i.e., the extent to which different subject areas of biomedicine are characterised by different linguistic behaviour. While variation at a coarser domain level such as between newswire and biomedical text is well-studied and known to affect the portability of NLP systems, we are the first to conduct an extensive investigation into more fine-grained levels of variation. Results Using the large OpenPMC text corpus, which spans the many subdomains of biomedicine, we investigate variation across a number of lexical, syntactic, semantic and discourse-related dimensions. These dimensions are chosen for their relevance to the performance of NLP systems. We use clustering techniques to analyse commonalities and distinctions among the subdomains. Conclusions We find that while patterns of inter-subdomain variation differ somewhat from one feature set to another, robust clusters can be identified that correspond to intuitive distinctions such as that between clinical and laboratory subjects. In particular, subdomains relating to genetics and molecular biology, which are the most common sources of material for training and evaluating biomedical NLP tools, are not representative of all biomedical subdomains. We conclude that an awareness of subdomain variation is important when considering the practical use of language processing applications by biomedical researchers.

Finding and accessing diagrams in biomedical publications.

Science.gov (United States)

Kuhn, Tobias; Luong, ThaiBinh; Krauthammer, Michael

2012-01-01

Complex relationships in biomedical publications are often communicated by diagrams such as bar and line charts, which are a very effective way of summarizing and communicating multi-faceted data sets. Given the ever-increasing amount of published data, we argue that the precise retrieval of such diagrams is of great value for answering specific and otherwise hard-to-meet information needs. To this end, we demonstrate the use of advanced image processing and classification for identifying bar and line charts by the shape and relative location of the different image elements that make up the charts. With recall and precisions of close to 90% for the detection of relevant figures, we discuss the use of this technology in an existing biomedical image search engine, and outline how it enables new forms of literature queries over biomedical relationships that are represented in these charts.

Electroactive polymers for healthcare and biomedical applications

Science.gov (United States)

Bauer, Siegfried

2017-04-01

Electroactivity was noticed early in biological substances, including proteins, polynucleotides and enzymes, even piezoand pyroelectricity were found in wool, hair, wood, bone and tendon. Recently, ferroelectricity has been identified in a surprisingly large number of biologically relevant materials, including hydroxyapatite, aortic walls and elastin. Inspired by the variety of natural electroactive materials, a wealth of new elastomers and polymers were designed recently, including an all organic elastomer electret and self-healing dielectric elastomers. Let's further draw inspiration from nature and widen the utilization of electroactive polymers towards (mobile) healthcare and biomedical applications. Ferroelectrets, internally charged polymer foams with a strong piezoelectric thickness coefficient are employed in biomedical sensing, for example as blood pressure and pulse sensor, as vital signs monitor or for the detection of tonicclonic seizures. Piezo- and pyroelectric polymers are booming in printed electronics research. They provide electronic skin the ability to "feel" pressure and temperature changes, or to generate electrical energy from vibrations and motions, even from contractile and relaxation motions of the heart and lung. Dielectric elastomers are pioneered by StretchSense as wearable motion capture sensors, monitoring pressure, stretch, bend and shear, quantifying comfort in sports and healthcare. On the cellular level, electroactive polymer arrays are used to study mechanotransduction of individual cells. Ionic electroactive polymers show potential to be used in implantable electroactive biomedical devices. Already with the currently available science and technology, we are at the verge of witnessing the demonstration of truly complex bionic systems.

Biomedical technology prosperity game{trademark}

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Berman, M.; Boyack, K.W.; Wesenberg, D.L.

1996-07-01

Prosperity Games{trademark} are an outgrowth and adaptation of move/countermove and seminar War Games. Prosperity Games{trademark} are simulations that explore complex issues in a variety of areas including economics, politics, sociology, environment, education and research. These issues can be examined from a variety of perspectives ranging from a global, macroeconomic and geopolitical viewpoint down to the details of customer/supplier/market interactions in specific industries. All Prosperity Games{trademark} are unique in that both the game format and the player contributions vary from game to game. This report documents the Biomedical Technology Prosperity Game{trademark} conducted under the sponsorship of Sandia National Laboratories, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Koop Foundation, Inc. Players were drawn from all stakeholders involved in biomedical technologies including patients, hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, legislators, suppliers/manufacturers, regulators, funding organizations, universities/laboratories, and the legal profession. The primary objectives of this game were to: (1) Identify advanced/critical technology issues that affect the cost and quality of health care. (2) Explore the development, patenting, manufacturing and licensing of needed technologies that would decrease costs while maintaining or improving quality. (3) Identify policy and regulatory changes that would reduce costs and improve quality and timeliness of health care delivery. (4) Identify and apply existing resources and facilities to develop and implement improved technologies and policies. (5) Begin to develop Biomedical Technology Roadmaps for industry and government cooperation. The deliberations and recommendations of these players provided valuable insights as to the views of this diverse group of decision makers concerning biomedical issues. Significant progress was made in the roadmapping of key areas in the biomedical technology field.

Opal web services for biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Ren, Jingyuan; Williams, Nadya; Clementi, Luca; Krishnan, Sriram; Li, Wilfred W

2010-07-01

Biomedical applications have become increasingly complex, and they often require large-scale high-performance computing resources with a large number of processors and memory. The complexity of application deployment and the advances in cluster, grid and cloud computing require new modes of support for biomedical research. Scientific Software as a Service (sSaaS) enables scalable and transparent access to biomedical applications through simple standards-based Web interfaces. Towards this end, we built a production web server (http://ws.nbcr.net) in August 2007 to support the bioinformatics application called MEME. The server has grown since to include docking analysis with AutoDock and AutoDock Vina, electrostatic calculations using PDB2PQR and APBS, and off-target analysis using SMAP. All the applications on the servers are powered by Opal, a toolkit that allows users to wrap scientific applications easily as web services without any modification to the scientific codes, by writing simple XML configuration files. Opal allows both web forms-based access and programmatic access of all our applications. The Opal toolkit currently supports SOAP-based Web service access to a number of popular applications from the National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR) and affiliated collaborative and service projects. In addition, Opal's programmatic access capability allows our applications to be accessed through many workflow tools, including Vision, Kepler, Nimrod/K and VisTrails. From mid-August 2007 to the end of 2009, we have successfully executed 239,814 jobs. The number of successfully executed jobs more than doubled from 205 to 411 per day between 2008 and 2009. The Opal-enabled service model is useful for a wide range of applications. It provides for interoperation with other applications with Web Service interfaces, and allows application developers to focus on the scientific tool and workflow development. Web server availability: http://ws.nbcr.net.

Applications of computational intelligence in biomedical technology

CERN Document Server

Majernik, Jaroslav; Pancerz, Krzysztof; Zaitseva, Elena

2016-01-01

This book presents latest results and selected applications of Computational Intelligence in Biomedical Technologies. Most of contributions deal with problems of Biomedical and Medical Informatics, ranging from theoretical considerations to practical applications. Various aspects of development methods and algorithms in Biomedical and Medical Informatics as well as Algorithms for medical image processing, modeling methods are discussed. Individual contributions also cover medical decision making support, estimation of risks of treatments, reliability of medical systems, problems of practical clinical applications and many other topics  This book is intended for scientists interested in problems of Biomedical Technologies, for researchers and academic staff, for all dealing with Biomedical and Medical Informatics, as well as PhD students. Useful information is offered also to IT companies, developers of equipment and/or software for medicine and medical professionals.  .

FULERENIC MATERIALS WITH BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Radu Claudiu FIERASCU

2010-05-01

Full Text Available Soluble fullerenic derivates are essential for numerous biomedical techniques that exploit the unique structural chemical and physical properties of carbon nanospheres. Their toxicity, demonstrated in vitro and in vivo is important for the characterization and limitation of those applications. The phototoxicity of some fullerene molecules was identified as a future therapeutical instrument. Other studies focused on the decrease of the phototoxicity of hydrosoluble fullerenes follow the use of those compounds as drug delivery systems or their use in environment protection. Starting from the characteristics of those compounds, which can be by themeselves cytotoxic, or could become during irradiation (photosensitizers we have tried to obtain new materials based on fullerenes and diads/triads fullerene/porphyrines or fullerenes/calixarenes.The obtained complexes were characterized by UV Vis and IR spectroscopy.

Signals and Systems in Biomedical Engineering Signal Processing and Physiological Systems Modeling

CERN Document Server

Devasahayam, Suresh R

2013-01-01

The use of digital signal processing is ubiquitous in the field of physiology and biomedical engineering. The application of such mathematical and computational tools requires a formal or explicit understanding of physiology. Formal models and analytical techniques are interlinked in physiology as in any other field. This book takes a unitary approach to physiological systems, beginning with signal measurement and acquisition, followed by signal processing, linear systems modelling, and computer simulations. The signal processing techniques range across filtering, spectral analysis and wavelet analysis. Emphasis is placed on fundamental understanding of the concepts as well as solving numerical problems. Graphs and analogies are used extensively to supplement the mathematics. Detailed models of nerve and muscle at the cellular and systemic levels provide examples for the mathematical methods and computer simulations. Several of the models are sufficiently sophisticated to be of value in understanding real wor...

Biomedical sensor design using analog compressed sensing

Science.gov (United States)

Balouchestani, Mohammadreza; Krishnan, Sridhar

2015-05-01

The main drawback of current healthcare systems is the location-specific nature of the system due to the use of fixed/wired biomedical sensors. Since biomedical sensors are usually driven by a battery, power consumption is the most important factor determining the life of a biomedical sensor. They are also restricted by size, cost, and transmission capacity. Therefore, it is important to reduce the load of sampling by merging the sampling and compression steps to reduce the storage usage, transmission times, and power consumption in order to expand the current healthcare systems to Wireless Healthcare Systems (WHSs). In this work, we present an implementation of a low-power biomedical sensor using analog Compressed Sensing (CS) framework for sparse biomedical signals that addresses both the energy and telemetry bandwidth constraints of wearable and wireless Body-Area Networks (BANs). This architecture enables continuous data acquisition and compression of biomedical signals that are suitable for a variety of diagnostic and treatment purposes. At the transmitter side, an analog-CS framework is applied at the sensing step before Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) in order to generate the compressed version of the input analog bio-signal. At the receiver side, a reconstruction algorithm based on Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) condition is applied in order to reconstruct the original bio-signals form the compressed bio-signals with high probability and enough accuracy. We examine the proposed algorithm with healthy and neuropathy surface Electromyography (sEMG) signals. The proposed algorithm achieves a good level for Average Recognition Rate (ARR) at 93% and reconstruction accuracy at 98.9%. In addition, The proposed architecture reduces total computation time from 32 to 11.5 seconds at sampling-rate=29 % of Nyquist rate, Percentage Residual Difference (PRD)=26 %, Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE)=3 %.

A Multilayer Secure Biomedical Data Management System for Remotely Managing a Very Large Number of Diverse Personal Healthcare Devices

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

KeeHyun Park

2015-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper, a multilayer secure biomedical data management system for managing a very large number of diverse personal health devices is proposed. The system has the following characteristics: the system supports international standard communication protocols to achieve interoperability. The system is integrated in the sense that both a PHD communication system and a remote PHD management system work together as a single system. Finally, the system proposed in this paper provides user/message authentication processes to securely transmit biomedical data measured by PHDs based on the concept of a biomedical signature. Some experiments, including the stress test, have been conducted to show that the system proposed/constructed in this study performs very well even when a very large number of PHDs are used. For a stress test, up to 1,200 threads are made to represent the same number of PHD agents. The loss ratio of the ISO/IEEE 11073 messages in the normal system is as high as 14% when 1,200 PHD agents are connected. On the other hand, no message loss occurs in the multilayered system proposed in this study, which demonstrates the superiority of the multilayered system to the normal system with regard to heavy traffic.

Biomedical engineering education--status and perspectives.

Science.gov (United States)

Magjarevic, Ratko; Zequera Diaz, Martha L

2014-01-01

Biomedical Engineering programs are present at a large number of universities all over the world with an increasing trend. New generations of biomedical engineers have to face the challenges of health care systems round the world which need a large number of professionals not only to support the present technology in the health care system but to develop new devices and services. Health care stakeholders would like to have innovative solutions directed towards solving problems of the world growing incidence of chronic disease and ageing population. These new solutions have to meet the requirements for continuous monitoring, support or care outside clinical settlements. Presence of these needs can be tracked through data from the Labor Organization in the U.S. showing that biomedical engineering jobs have the largest growth at the engineering labor market with expected 72% growth rate in the period from 2008-2018. In European Union the number of patents (i.e. innovation) is the highest in the category of biomedical technology. Biomedical engineering curricula have to adopt to the new needs and for expectations of the future. In this paper we want to give an overview of engineering professions in related to engineering in medicine and biology and the current status of BME education in some regions, as a base for further discussions.

Advances in electronic-nose technologies developed for biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Wilson, Alphus D; Baietto, Manuela

2011-01-01

The research and development of new electronic-nose applications in the biomedical field has accelerated at a phenomenal rate over the past 25 years. Many innovative e-nose technologies have provided solutions and applications to a wide variety of complex biomedical and healthcare problems. The purposes of this review are to present a comprehensive analysis of past and recent biomedical research findings and developments of electronic-nose sensor technologies, and to identify current and future potential e-nose applications that will continue to advance the effectiveness and efficiency of biomedical treatments and healthcare services for many years. An abundance of electronic-nose applications has been developed for a variety of healthcare sectors including diagnostics, immunology, pathology, patient recovery, pharmacology, physical therapy, physiology, preventative medicine, remote healthcare, and wound and graft healing. Specific biomedical e-nose applications range from uses in biochemical testing, blood-compatibility evaluations, disease diagnoses, and drug delivery to monitoring of metabolic levels, organ dysfunctions, and patient conditions through telemedicine. This paper summarizes the major electronic-nose technologies developed for healthcare and biomedical applications since the late 1980s when electronic aroma detection technologies were first recognized to be potentially useful in providing effective solutions to problems in the healthcare industry.

Advances in Electronic-Nose Technologies Developed for Biomedical Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alphus D. Wilson

2011-01-01

Full Text Available The research and development of new electronic-nose applications in the biomedical field has accelerated at a phenomenal rate over the past 25 years. Many innovative e-nose technologies have provided solutions and applications to a wide variety of complex biomedical and healthcare problems. The purposes of this review are to present a comprehensive analysis of past and recent biomedical research findings and developments of electronic-nose sensor technologies, and to identify current and future potential e-nose applications that will continue to advance the effectiveness and efficiency of biomedical treatments and healthcare services for many years. An abundance of electronic-nose applications has been developed for a variety of healthcare sectors including diagnostics, immunology, pathology, patient recovery, pharmacology, physical therapy, physiology, preventative medicine, remote healthcare, and wound and graft healing. Specific biomedical e-nose applications range from uses in biochemical testing, blood-compatibility evaluations, disease diagnoses, and drug delivery to monitoring of metabolic levels, organ dysfunctions, and patient conditions through telemedicine. This paper summarizes the major electronic-nose technologies developed for healthcare and biomedical applications since the late 1980s when electronic aroma detection technologies were first recognized to be potentially useful in providing effective solutions to problems in the healthcare industry.

Pattern recognition and expert image analysis systems in biomedical image processing (Invited Paper)

Science.gov (United States)

Oosterlinck, A.; Suetens, P.; Wu, Q.; Baird, M.; F. M., C.

1987-09-01

This paper gives an overview of pattern recoanition techniques (P.R.) used in biomedical image processing and problems related to the different P.R. solutions. Also the use of knowledge based systems to overcome P.R. difficulties, is described. This is illustrated by a common example ofabiomedical image processing application.

Design, Microfabrication and Characterization of a Power Delivery System for new Biomedical Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

CARUSO Massimo

2017-05-01

Full Text Available This paper presents the design, microfabrication and characterization of a wireless power delivery system capable of driving a surface acoustic wave sensor (SAW for biomedical applications. The system consists of two planar, spiral-square microcoils, which have been geometrically optimized in order to maximize the quality factor Q. The integration of the SAW - microcoil system into artificial implant sites will allow a real-time biofilm growth monitoring and treatment, providing countless advantages to the related medical applications.

A Scalable Data Access Layer to Manage Structured Heterogeneous Biomedical Data.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Giovanni Delussu

Full Text Available This work presents a scalable data access layer, called PyEHR, designed to support the implementation of data management systems for secondary use of structured heterogeneous biomedical and clinical data. PyEHR adopts the openEHR's formalisms to guarantee the decoupling of data descriptions from implementation details and exploits structure indexing to accelerate searches. Data persistence is guaranteed by a driver layer with a common driver interface. Interfaces for two NoSQL Database Management Systems are already implemented: MongoDB and Elasticsearch. We evaluated the scalability of PyEHR experimentally through two types of tests, called "Constant Load" and "Constant Number of Records", with queries of increasing complexity on synthetic datasets of ten million records each, containing very complex openEHR archetype structures, distributed on up to ten computing nodes.

A Scalable Data Access Layer to Manage Structured Heterogeneous Biomedical Data

Science.gov (United States)

Lianas, Luca; Frexia, Francesca; Zanetti, Gianluigi

2016-01-01

This work presents a scalable data access layer, called PyEHR, designed to support the implementation of data management systems for secondary use of structured heterogeneous biomedical and clinical data. PyEHR adopts the openEHR’s formalisms to guarantee the decoupling of data descriptions from implementation details and exploits structure indexing to accelerate searches. Data persistence is guaranteed by a driver layer with a common driver interface. Interfaces for two NoSQL Database Management Systems are already implemented: MongoDB and Elasticsearch. We evaluated the scalability of PyEHR experimentally through two types of tests, called “Constant Load” and “Constant Number of Records”, with queries of increasing complexity on synthetic datasets of ten million records each, containing very complex openEHR archetype structures, distributed on up to ten computing nodes. PMID:27936191

A Scalable Data Access Layer to Manage Structured Heterogeneous Biomedical Data.

Science.gov (United States)

Delussu, Giovanni; Lianas, Luca; Frexia, Francesca; Zanetti, Gianluigi

2016-01-01

This work presents a scalable data access layer, called PyEHR, designed to support the implementation of data management systems for secondary use of structured heterogeneous biomedical and clinical data. PyEHR adopts the openEHR's formalisms to guarantee the decoupling of data descriptions from implementation details and exploits structure indexing to accelerate searches. Data persistence is guaranteed by a driver layer with a common driver interface. Interfaces for two NoSQL Database Management Systems are already implemented: MongoDB and Elasticsearch. We evaluated the scalability of PyEHR experimentally through two types of tests, called "Constant Load" and "Constant Number of Records", with queries of increasing complexity on synthetic datasets of ten million records each, containing very complex openEHR archetype structures, distributed on up to ten computing nodes.

Biomedical data integration in computational drug design and bioinformatics.

Science.gov (United States)

Seoane, Jose A; Aguiar-Pulido, Vanessa; Munteanu, Cristian R; Rivero, Daniel; Rabunal, Juan R; Dorado, Julian; Pazos, Alejandro

2013-03-01

In recent years, in the post genomic era, more and more data is being generated by biological high throughput technologies, such as proteomics and transcriptomics. This omics data can be very useful, but the real challenge is to analyze all this data, as a whole, after integrating it. Biomedical data integration enables making queries to different, heterogeneous and distributed biomedical data sources. Data integration solutions can be very useful not only in the context of drug design, but also in biomedical information retrieval, clinical diagnosis, system biology, etc. In this review, we analyze the most common approaches to biomedical data integration, such as federated databases, data warehousing, multi-agent systems and semantic technology, as well as the solutions developed using these approaches in the past few years.

An exploration of the biomedical optics course construction of undergraduate biomedical engineering program in medical colleges

Science.gov (United States)

Guo, Shijun; Lyu, Jie; Zhang, Peiming

2017-08-01

In this paper, the teaching goals, teaching contents and teaching methods in biomedical optics course construction are discussed. From the dimension of teaching goals, students should master the principle of optical inspection on the human body, diagnosis and treatment of methodology and instruments, through the study of the theory and practice of this course, and can utilize biomedical optics methods to solve practical problems in the clinical medical engineering practice. From the dimension of teaching contents, based on the characteristics of biomedical engineering in medical colleges, the organic integration of engineering aspects, medical optical instruments, and biomedical aspects dispersed in human anatomy, human physiology, clinical medicine fundamental related to the biomedical optics is build. Noninvasive measurement of the human body composition and noninvasive optical imaging of the human body were taken as actual problems in biomedical optics fields. Typical medical applications such as eye optics and laser medicine were also integrated into the theory and practice teaching. From the dimension of teaching methods, referencing to organ-system based medical teaching mode, optical principle and instrument principle were taught by teachers from school of medical instruments, and the histological characteristics and clinical actual need in areas such as digestive diseases and urinary surgery were taught by teachers from school of basic medicine or clinical medicine of medical colleges. Furthermore, clinical application guidance would be provided by physician and surgeons in hospitals.

Biomedical photonics handbook biomedical diagnostics

CERN Document Server

Vo-Dinh, Tuan

2014-01-01

Shaped by Quantum Theory, Technology, and the Genomics RevolutionThe integration of photonics, electronics, biomaterials, and nanotechnology holds great promise for the future of medicine. This topic has recently experienced an explosive growth due to the noninvasive or minimally invasive nature and the cost-effectiveness of photonic modalities in medical diagnostics and therapy. The second edition of the Biomedical Photonics Handbook presents fundamental developments as well as important applications of biomedical photonics of interest to scientists, engineers, manufacturers, teachers, studen

A comparative analysis of biomedical research ethics regulation systems in Europe and Latin America with regard to the protection of human subjects.

Science.gov (United States)

Lamas, Eugenia; Ferrer, Marcela; Molina, Alberto; Salinas, Rodrigo; Hevia, Adriana; Bota, Alexandre; Feinholz, Dafna; Fuchs, Michael; Schramm, Roland; Tealdi, Juan-Carlos; Zorrilla, Sergio

2010-12-01

The European project European and Latin American Systems of Ethics Regulation of Biomedical Research Project (EULABOR) has carried out the first comparative analysis of ethics regulation systems for biomedical research in seven countries in Europe and Latin America, evaluating their roles in the protection of human subjects. We developed a conceptual and methodological framework defining 'ethics regulation system for biomedical research' as a set of actors, institutions, codes and laws involved in overseeing the ethics of biomedical research on humans. This framework allowed us to develop comprehensive national reports by conducting semi-structured interviews to key informants. These reports were summarised and analysed in a comparative analysis. The study showed that the regulatory framework for clinical research in these countries differ in scope. It showed that despite the different political contexts, actors involved and motivations for creating the regulation, in most of the studied countries it was the government who took the lead in setting up the system. The study also showed that Europe and Latin America are similar regarding national bodies and research ethics committees, but the Brazilian system has strong and noteworthy specificities.

Diode laser based light sources for biomedical applications

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Müller, André; Marschall, Sebastian; Jensen, Ole Bjarlin

2013-01-01

Diode lasers are by far the most efficient lasers currently available. With the ever-continuing improvement in diode laser technology, this type of laser has become increasingly attractive for a wide range of biomedical applications. Compared to the characteristics of competing laser systems, diode...... imaging. This review provides an overview of the latest development of diode laser technology and systems and their use within selected biomedical applications....

Stimuli-responsive magnetic particles for biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Medeiros, S F; Santos, A M; Fessi, H; Elaissari, A

2011-01-17

In recent years, magnetic nanoparticles have been studied due to their potential applications as magnetic carriers in biomedical area. These materials have been increasingly exploited as efficient delivery vectors, leading to opportunities of use as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) agents, mediators of hyperthermia cancer treatment and in targeted therapies. Much attention has been also focused on "smart" polymers, which are able to respond to environmental changes, such as changes in the temperature and pH. In this context, this article reviews the state-of-the art in stimuli-responsive magnetic systems for biomedical applications. The paper describes different types of stimuli-sensitive systems, mainly temperature- and pH sensitive polymers, the combination of this characteristic with magnetic properties and, finally, it gives an account of their preparation methods. The article also discusses the main in vivo biomedical applications of such materials. A survey of the recent literature on various stimuli-responsive magnetic gels in biomedical applications is also included. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

3rd International Conference on Nanotechnologies and Biomedical Engineering

CERN Document Server

Tiginyanu, Ion

2016-01-01

This volume presents the proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Nanotechnologies and Biomedical Engineering which was held on September 23-26, 2015 in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. ICNBME-2015 continues the series of International Conferences in the field of nanotechnologies and biomedical engineering. It aims at bringing together scientists and engineers dealing with fundamental and applied research for reporting on the latest theoretical developments and applications involved in the fields. Topics include Nanotechnologies and nanomaterials Plasmonics and metamaterials Bio-micro/nano technologies Biomaterials Biosensors and sensors systems Biomedical instrumentation Biomedical signal processing Biomedical imaging and image processing Molecular, cellular and tissue engineering Clinical engineering, health technology management and assessment; Health informatics, e-health and telemedicine Biomedical engineering education Nuclear and radiation safety and security Innovations and technology transfer...

Structural DNA Nanotechnology: Artificial Nanostructures for Biomedical Research.

Science.gov (United States)

Ke, Yonggang; Castro, Carlos; Choi, Jong Hyun

2018-04-04

Structural DNA nanotechnology utilizes synthetic or biologic DNA as designer molecules for the self-assembly of artificial nanostructures. The field is founded upon the specific interactions between DNA molecules, known as Watson-Crick base pairing. After decades of active pursuit, DNA has demonstrated unprecedented versatility in constructing artificial nanostructures with significant complexity and programmability. The nanostructures could be either static, with well-controlled physicochemical properties, or dynamic, with the ability to reconfigure upon external stimuli. Researchers have devoted considerable effort to exploring the usability of DNA nanostructures in biomedical research. We review the basic design methods for fabricating both static and dynamic DNA nanostructures, along with their biomedical applications in fields such as biosensing, bioimaging, and drug delivery. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering Volume 20 is June 4, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

BIOMedical Search Engine Framework: Lightweight and customized implementation of domain-specific biomedical search engines.

Science.gov (United States)

Jácome, Alberto G; Fdez-Riverola, Florentino; Lourenço, Anália

2016-07-01

Text mining and semantic analysis approaches can be applied to the construction of biomedical domain-specific search engines and provide an attractive alternative to create personalized and enhanced search experiences. Therefore, this work introduces the new open-source BIOMedical Search Engine Framework for the fast and lightweight development of domain-specific search engines. The rationale behind this framework is to incorporate core features typically available in search engine frameworks with flexible and extensible technologies to retrieve biomedical documents, annotate meaningful domain concepts, and develop highly customized Web search interfaces. The BIOMedical Search Engine Framework integrates taggers for major biomedical concepts, such as diseases, drugs, genes, proteins, compounds and organisms, and enables the use of domain-specific controlled vocabulary. Technologies from the Typesafe Reactive Platform, the AngularJS JavaScript framework and the Bootstrap HTML/CSS framework support the customization of the domain-oriented search application. Moreover, the RESTful API of the BIOMedical Search Engine Framework allows the integration of the search engine into existing systems or a complete web interface personalization. The construction of the Smart Drug Search is described as proof-of-concept of the BIOMedical Search Engine Framework. This public search engine catalogs scientific literature about antimicrobial resistance, microbial virulence and topics alike. The keyword-based queries of the users are transformed into concepts and search results are presented and ranked accordingly. The semantic graph view portraits all the concepts found in the results, and the researcher may look into the relevance of different concepts, the strength of direct relations, and non-trivial, indirect relations. The number of occurrences of the concept shows its importance to the query, and the frequency of concept co-occurrence is indicative of biological relations

75 FR 3948 - Big Sky Energy Corp., Biomedical Waste Systems, Inc., Biometrics Security Technology, Inc...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-25

... SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION [File No. 500-1] Big Sky Energy Corp., Biomedical Waste Systems, Inc., Biometrics Security Technology, Inc., Biosys, Inc., Bolder Technologies Corp., Boyds Wheels, Inc... securities of Biometrics Security Technology, Inc. because it has not filed any periodic reports since...

Bio-medical CMOS ICs

CERN Document Server

Yoo, Hoi-Jun

2011-01-01

This book is based on a graduate course entitled, Ubiquitous Healthcare Circuits and Systems, that was given by one of the editors. It includes an introduction and overview to biomedical ICs and provides information on the current trends in research.

Crowdsourcing biomedical research: leveraging communities as innovation engines.

Science.gov (United States)

Saez-Rodriguez, Julio; Costello, James C; Friend, Stephen H; Kellen, Michael R; Mangravite, Lara; Meyer, Pablo; Norman, Thea; Stolovitzky, Gustavo

2016-07-15

The generation of large-scale biomedical data is creating unprecedented opportunities for basic and translational science. Typically, the data producers perform initial analyses, but it is very likely that the most informative methods may reside with other groups. Crowdsourcing the analysis of complex and massive data has emerged as a framework to find robust methodologies. When the crowdsourcing is done in the form of collaborative scientific competitions, known as Challenges, the validation of the methods is inherently addressed. Challenges also encourage open innovation, create collaborative communities to solve diverse and important biomedical problems, and foster the creation and dissemination of well-curated data repositories.

Acquisition and manipulation of computed tomography images of the maxillofacial region for biomedical prototyping

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Meurer, Maria Ines; Silva, Jorge Vicente Lopes da; Santa Barbara, Ailton; Nobre, Luiz Felipe; Oliveira, Marilia Gerhardt de; Silva, Daniela Nascimento

2008-01-01

Biomedical prototyping has resulted from a merger of rapid prototyping and imaging diagnosis technologies. However, this process is complex, considering the necessity of interaction between biomedical sciences and engineering. Good results are highly dependent on the acquisition of computed tomography images and their subsequent manipulation by means of specific software. The present study describes the experience of a multidisciplinary group of researchers in the acquisition and manipulation of computed tomography images of the maxillofacial region aiming at biomedical prototyping for surgical purposes. (author)

Selected Topics in MicroNano-robotics for Biomedical Applications

CERN Document Server

2013-01-01

Selected Topics in Micro/Nano-robotics for Biomedical Applications features a system approach and incorporates modern methodologies in autonomous mobile robots for programmable and controllable micro/nano-robots aiming at biomedical applications. The book provides chapters of instructional materials and cutting-edge research results in micro/nanorobotics for biomedical applications. The book presents new sensing technology on nanofibers, new power supply techniques including miniature fuel cells and energy harvesting devices, and manipulation techniques including AFM-based nano-robotic manipulation, robot-aided optical tweezers, and robot-assisted catheter surgery systems. It also contains case studies on using micro/nano-robots in biomedical environments and in biomedicine, as well as a design example to conceptually develop a Vitamin-pill sized robot to enter human’s gastrointestinal tract. Each chapter covers a different topic of the highly interdisciplinary area. Bring together the selected topics into ...

Harvest: an open platform for developing web-based biomedical data discovery and reporting applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Pennington, Jeffrey W; Ruth, Byron; Italia, Michael J; Miller, Jeffrey; Wrazien, Stacey; Loutrel, Jennifer G; Crenshaw, E Bryan; White, Peter S

2014-01-01

Biomedical researchers share a common challenge of making complex data understandable and accessible as they seek inherent relationships between attributes in disparate data types. Data discovery in this context is limited by a lack of query systems that efficiently show relationships between individual variables, but without the need to navigate underlying data models. We have addressed this need by developing Harvest, an open-source framework of modular components, and using it for the rapid development and deployment of custom data discovery software applications. Harvest incorporates visualizations of highly dimensional data in a web-based interface that promotes rapid exploration and export of any type of biomedical information, without exposing researchers to underlying data models. We evaluated Harvest with two cases: clinical data from pediatric cardiology and demonstration data from the OpenMRS project. Harvest's architecture and public open-source code offer a set of rapid application development tools to build data discovery applications for domain-specific biomedical data repositories. All resources, including the OpenMRS demonstration, can be found at http://harvest.research.chop.edu.

Complex system modelling and control through intelligent soft computations

CERN Document Server

Azar, Ahmad

2015-01-01

The book offers a snapshot of the theories and applications of soft computing in the area of complex systems modeling and control. It presents the most important findings discussed during the 5th International Conference on Modelling, Identification and Control, held in Cairo, from August 31-September 2, 2013. The book consists of twenty-nine selected contributions, which have been thoroughly reviewed and extended before their inclusion in the volume. The different chapters, written by active researchers in the field, report on both current theories and important applications of soft-computing. Besides providing the readers with soft-computing fundamentals, and soft-computing based inductive methodologies/algorithms, the book also discusses key industrial soft-computing applications, as well as multidisciplinary solutions developed for a variety of purposes, like windup control, waste management, security issues, biomedical applications and many others. It is a perfect reference guide for graduate students, r...

Design of biomedical devices and systems

CERN Document Server

King, Paul H

2008-01-01

Introduction to Biomedical Engineering Design. Fundamental Design Tools. Design Team Management, Reporting, and Documentation. Product Definition. Product Documentation. Product Development. Hardware Development Methods and Tools. Software Development Methods and Tools. Human Factors. Industrial Design. Biomaterials and Material Testing. Safety Engineering: Devices and Processes. Testing. Analysis of Test Data. Reliability and Liability. Food and Drug Administration. Regulations and Standards. Licensing, Patents, Copyrights, and Trade Secrets. Manufacturing and Quality Control. Miscellaneous Issues. Product Issues. Professional Issues. Design Case Studies. Future Design Issues.

TERMA Framework for Biomedical Signal Analysis: An Economic-Inspired Approach

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohamed Elgendi

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Biomedical signals contain features that represent physiological events, and each of these events has peaks. The analysis of biomedical signals for monitoring or diagnosing diseases requires the detection of these peaks, making event detection a crucial step in biomedical signal processing. Many researchers have difficulty detecting these peaks to investigate, interpret and analyze their corresponding events. To date, there is no generic framework that captures these events in a robust, efficient and consistent manner. A new method referred to for the first time as two event-related moving averages (“TERMA” involves event-related moving averages and detects events in biomedical signals. The TERMA framework is flexible and universal and consists of six independent LEGO building bricks to achieve high accuracy detection of biomedical events. Results recommend that the window sizes for the two moving averages ( W 1 and W 2 have to follow the inequality ( 8 × W 1 ≥ W 2 ≥ ( 2 × W 1 . Moreover, TERMA is a simple yet efficient event detector that is suitable for wearable devices, point-of-care devices, fitness trackers and smart watches, compared to more complex machine learning solutions.

qPortal: A platform for data-driven biomedical research.

Science.gov (United States)

Mohr, Christopher; Friedrich, Andreas; Wojnar, David; Kenar, Erhan; Polatkan, Aydin Can; Codrea, Marius Cosmin; Czemmel, Stefan; Kohlbacher, Oliver; Nahnsen, Sven

2018-01-01

Modern biomedical research aims at drawing biological conclusions from large, highly complex biological datasets. It has become common practice to make extensive use of high-throughput technologies that produce big amounts of heterogeneous data. In addition to the ever-improving accuracy, methods are getting faster and cheaper, resulting in a steadily increasing need for scalable data management and easily accessible means of analysis. We present qPortal, a platform providing users with an intuitive way to manage and analyze quantitative biological data. The backend leverages a variety of concepts and technologies, such as relational databases, data stores, data models and means of data transfer, as well as front-end solutions to give users access to data management and easy-to-use analysis options. Users are empowered to conduct their experiments from the experimental design to the visualization of their results through the platform. Here, we illustrate the feature-rich portal by simulating a biomedical study based on publically available data. We demonstrate the software's strength in supporting the entire project life cycle. The software supports the project design and registration, empowers users to do all-digital project management and finally provides means to perform analysis. We compare our approach to Galaxy, one of the most widely used scientific workflow and analysis platforms in computational biology. Application of both systems to a small case study shows the differences between a data-driven approach (qPortal) and a workflow-driven approach (Galaxy). qPortal, a one-stop-shop solution for biomedical projects offers up-to-date analysis pipelines, quality control workflows, and visualization tools. Through intensive user interactions, appropriate data models have been developed. These models build the foundation of our biological data management system and provide possibilities to annotate data, query metadata for statistics and future re-analysis on

Preliminary design of the beam transport system for the Milan biomedical cyclotron

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Silari, M.

1988-01-01

This report illustrates the preliminary design of the beam transport system for the Scanditronix MC40 cyclotron to be installed in Milan. The Cyclotron will be dedicated to biomedical research and the different experimental conditions that could occur will require a beam transport system flexible enough so as to deliver beams with the specified characteristics. The report describes the computer codes used, the calculations performed and the results obtained. The complete configuration of the beam lines serving the first two target rooms is given, together with typical beam profiles and the emittance ellipse variation along the transfer channels

Introduction to biomedical engineering

CERN Document Server

Enderle, John D; Blanchard, Susan M

2005-01-01

Under the direction of John Enderle, Susan Blanchard and Joe Bronzino, leaders in the field have contributed chapters on the most relevant subjects for biomedical engineering students. These chapters coincide with courses offered in all biomedical engineering programs so that it can be used at different levels for a variety of courses of this evolving field. Introduction to Biomedical Engineering, Second Edition provides a historical perspective of the major developments in the biomedical field. Also contained within are the fundamental principles underlying biomedical engineering design, analysis, and modeling procedures. The numerous examples, drill problems and exercises are used to reinforce concepts and develop problem-solving skills making this book an invaluable tool for all biomedical students and engineers. New to this edition: Computational Biology, Medical Imaging, Genomics and Bioinformatics. * 60% update from first edition to reflect the developing field of biomedical engineering * New chapters o...

An information technology emphasis in biomedical informatics education.

Science.gov (United States)

Kane, Michael D; Brewer, Jeffrey L

2007-02-01

Unprecedented growth in the interdisciplinary domain of biomedical informatics reflects the recent advancements in genomic sequence availability, high-content biotechnology screening systems, as well as the expectations of computational biology to command a leading role in drug discovery and disease characterization. These forces have moved much of life sciences research almost completely into the computational domain. Importantly, educational training in biomedical informatics has been limited to students enrolled in the life sciences curricula, yet much of the skills needed to succeed in biomedical informatics involve or augment training in information technology curricula. This manuscript describes the methods and rationale for training students enrolled in information technology curricula in the field of biomedical informatics, which augments the existing information technology curriculum and provides training on specific subjects in Biomedical Informatics not emphasized in bioinformatics courses offered in life science programs, and does not require prerequisite courses in the life sciences.

Review of spectral imaging technology in biomedical engineering: achievements and challenges.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Qingli; He, Xiaofu; Wang, Yiting; Liu, Hongying; Xu, Dongrong; Guo, Fangmin

2013-10-01

Spectral imaging is a technology that integrates conventional imaging and spectroscopy to get both spatial and spectral information from an object. Although this technology was originally developed for remote sensing, it has been extended to the biomedical engineering field as a powerful analytical tool for biological and biomedical research. This review introduces the basics of spectral imaging, imaging methods, current equipment, and recent advances in biomedical applications. The performance and analytical capabilities of spectral imaging systems for biological and biomedical imaging are discussed. In particular, the current achievements and limitations of this technology in biomedical engineering are presented. The benefits and development trends of biomedical spectral imaging are highlighted to provide the reader with an insight into the current technological advances and its potential for biomedical research.

Industry careers for the biomedical engineer.

Science.gov (United States)

Munzner, Robert F

2004-01-01

This year's conference theme is "linkages for innovation in biomedicine." Biomedical engineers, especially those transitioning their career from academic study into medical device industry, will play a critical role in converting the fruits of scientific research into the reality of modern medical devices. This special session is organized to help biomedical engineers to achieve their career goals more effectively. Participants will have opportunities to hear from and interact with leading industrial experts on many issues. These may include but not limited to 1) career paths for biomedical engineers (industrial, academic, or federal; technical vs. managerial track; small start-up or large established companies); 2) unique design challenges and regulatory requirements in medical device development; 3) aspects of a successful biomedical engineering job candidate (such as resume, interview, follow-up). Suggestions for other topics are welcome and should be directed to xkong@ieee.org The distinguished panelists include: Xuan Kong, Ph.D., VP of Research, NEUROMetrix Inc, Waltham, MA Robert F. Munzner, Ph.D., Medical Device Consultant, Doctor Device, Herndon, VA Glen McLaughlin, Ph.D., VP of Engineering and CTO, Zonare Medical System Inc., Mountain View, CA Grace Bartoo, Ph.D., RAC, General Manager, Decus Biomedical LLC San Carlos, CA.

Successful aging: considering non-biomedical constructs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Carver LF

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Lisa F Carver,1 Diane Buchanan2 1Department of Sociology, Queen’s University Kingston, ON, Canada; 2School of Nursing, Queen’s University Kingston, ON, Canada Objectives: Successful aging continues to be applied in a variety of contexts and is defined using a number of different constructs. Although previous reviews highlight the multidimensionality of successful aging, a few have focused exclusively on non-biomedical factors, as was done here. Methods: This scoping review searched Ovid Medline database for peer-reviewed English-language articles published between 2006 and 2015, offering a model of successful aging and involving research with older adults. Results: Seventy-two articles were reviewed. Thirty-five articles met the inclusion criteria. Common non-biomedical constructs associated with successful aging included engagement, optimism and/or positive attitude, resilience, spirituality and/or religiosity, self-efficacy and/or self-esteem, and gerotranscendence. Discussion: Successful aging is a complex process best described using a multidimensional model. Given that the majority of elders will experience illness and/or disease during the life course, public health initiatives that promote successful aging need to employ non-biomedical constructs, facilitating the inclusion of elders living with disease and/or disability. Keywords: successful aging, resilience, gerotranscendence, engagement, optimism

From biomedical-engineering research to clinical application and industrialization

Science.gov (United States)

Taguchi, Tetsushi; Aoyagi, Takao

2012-12-01

The rising costs and aging of the population due to a low birth rate negatively affect the healthcare system in Japan. In 2011, the Council for Science and Technology Policy released the 4th Japan's Science and Technology Basic Policy Report from 2011 to 2015. This report includes two major innovations, 'Life Innovation' and 'Green Innovation', to promote economic growth. Biomedical engineering research is part of 'Life Innovation' and its outcomes are required to maintain people's mental and physical health. It has already resulted in numerous biomedical products, and new ones should be developed using nanotechnology-based concepts. The combination of accumulated knowledge and experience, and 'nanoarchitechtonics' will result in novel, well-designed functional biomaterials. This focus issue contains three reviews and 19 original papers on various biomedical topics, including biomaterials, drug-delivery systems, tissue engineering and diagnostics. We hope that it demonstrates the importance of collaboration among scientists, engineers and clinicians, and will contribute to the further development of biomedical engineering.

Translational Bioinformatics and Clinical Research (Biomedical) Informatics.

Science.gov (United States)

Sirintrapun, S Joseph; Zehir, Ahmet; Syed, Aijazuddin; Gao, JianJiong; Schultz, Nikolaus; Cheng, Donavan T

2015-06-01

Translational bioinformatics and clinical research (biomedical) informatics are the primary domains related to informatics activities that support translational research. Translational bioinformatics focuses on computational techniques in genetics, molecular biology, and systems biology. Clinical research (biomedical) informatics involves the use of informatics in discovery and management of new knowledge relating to health and disease. This article details 3 projects that are hybrid applications of translational bioinformatics and clinical research (biomedical) informatics: The Cancer Genome Atlas, the cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center clinical variants and results database, all designed to facilitate insights into cancer biology and clinical/therapeutic correlations. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bio-Inspired Extreme Wetting Surfaces for Biomedical Applications

Science.gov (United States)

Shin, Sera; Seo, Jungmok; Han, Heetak; Kang, Subin; Kim, Hyunchul; Lee, Taeyoon

2016-01-01

Biological creatures with unique surface wettability have long served as a source of inspiration for scientists and engineers. More specifically, materials exhibiting extreme wetting properties, such as superhydrophilic and superhydrophobic surfaces, have attracted considerable attention because of their potential use in various applications, such as self-cleaning fabrics, anti-fog windows, anti-corrosive coatings, drag-reduction systems, and efficient water transportation. In particular, the engineering of surface wettability by manipulating chemical properties and structure opens emerging biomedical applications ranging from high-throughput cell culture platforms to biomedical devices. This review describes design and fabrication methods for artificial extreme wetting surfaces. Next, we introduce some of the newer and emerging biomedical applications using extreme wetting surfaces. Current challenges and future prospects of the surfaces for potential biomedical applications are also addressed. PMID:28787916

Summer Biomedical Engineering Institute 1972

Science.gov (United States)

Deloatch, E. M.

1973-01-01

The five problems studied for biomedical applications of NASA technology are reported. The studies reported are: design modification of electrophoretic equipment, operating room environment control, hematological viscometry, handling system for iridium, and indirect blood pressure measuring device.

Biomedical Risk Factors of Achilles Tendinopathy in Physically Active People: a Systematic Review

OpenAIRE

Kozlovskaia, Maria; Vlahovich, Nicole; Ashton, Kevin J.; Hughes, David C.

2017-01-01

Background Achilles tendinopathy is the most prevalent tendon disorder in people engaged in running and jumping sports. Aetiology of Achilles tendinopathy is complex and requires comprehensive research of contributing risk factors. There is relatively little research focussing on potential biomedical risk factors for Achilles tendinopathy. The purpose of this systematic review is to identify studies and summarise current knowledge of biomedical risk factors of Achilles tendinopathy in physica...

Nanomaterials driven energy, environmental and biomedical research

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Sharma, Prakash C.; Srinivasan, Sesha S.; Wilson, Jeremiah F. [Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, AL 36088 (United States)

2014-03-31

We have developed state-of-the-art nanomaterials such as nanofibers, nanotubes, nanoparticles, nanocatalysts and nanostructures for clean energy, environmental and biomedical research. Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed, but it can be converted from one form to another. Based on this principle, chemical energy such as hydrogen has been produced from water electrolysis at a much lower voltage using RuO{sub 2} nanoparticles on the Si wafer substrate. Once the hydrogen is produced from the clean sources such as solar energy and water, it has to be stored by physisorption or chemisorption processes on to the solid state systems. For the successful physical adsorption of hydrogen molecule, we have developed novel polyaniline nanostructures via chemical templating and electrospinning routes. Chemical or complex hydrides involving nano MgH{sub 2} and transition metal nanocatalysts have been synthesized to tailor both the thermodynamics and kinetics of hydrogen (chemi) sorption respectively. Utilization of solar energy (UV-Vis) and a coupling of novel semiconductor oxide nanoparticles have been recently demonstrated with enhancement in photo-oxidation and/or photo-reduction processes for the water/air detoxification and sustainable liquid fuel production respectively. Magnetic nanoparticles such as ZnFe{sub 2}O{sub 4} have been synthesized and optimized for biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery and tumor diagnostic sensing (MRI)

Mixed Methods in Biomedical and Health Services Research

Science.gov (United States)

Curry, Leslie A.; Krumholz, Harlan M.; O’Cathain, Alicia; Plano Clark, Vicki L.; Cherlin, Emily; Bradley, Elizabeth H.

2013-01-01

Mixed methods studies, in which qualitative and quantitative methods are combined in a single program of inquiry, can be valuable in biomedical and health services research, where the complementary strengths of each approach can yield greater insight into complex phenomena than either approach alone. Although interest in mixed methods is growing among science funders and investigators, written guidance on how to conduct and assess rigorous mixed methods studies is not readily accessible to the general readership of peer-reviewed biomedical and health services journals. Furthermore, existing guidelines for publishing mixed methods studies are not well known or applied by researchers and journal editors. Accordingly, this paper is intended to serve as a concise, practical resource for readers interested in core principles and practices of mixed methods research. We briefly describe mixed methods approaches and present illustrations from published biomedical and health services literature, including in cardiovascular care, summarize standards for the design and reporting of these studies, and highlight four central considerations for investigators interested in using these methods. PMID:23322807

Fundamental of biomedical engineering

CERN Document Server

Sawhney, GS

2007-01-01

About the Book: A well set out textbook explains the fundamentals of biomedical engineering in the areas of biomechanics, biofluid flow, biomaterials, bioinstrumentation and use of computing in biomedical engineering. All these subjects form a basic part of an engineer''s education. The text is admirably suited to meet the needs of the students of mechanical engineering, opting for the elective of Biomedical Engineering. Coverage of bioinstrumentation, biomaterials and computing for biomedical engineers can meet the needs of the students of Electronic & Communication, Electronic & Instrumenta

Rewriting and suppressing UMLS terms for improved biomedical term identification

NARCIS (Netherlands)

K.M. Hettne (Kristina); E.M. van Mulligen (Erik); M.J. Schuemie (Martijn); R.J.A. Schijvenaars (Bob); J.A. Kors (Jan)

2010-01-01

textabstractBackground: Identification of terms is essential for biomedical text mining. We concentrate here on the use of vocabularies for term identification, specifically the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). To make the UMLS more suitable for biomedical text mining we implemented and

Micro/Nanostructured Films and Adhesives for Biomedical Applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Jungkyu K; Kang, Sung Min; Yang, Sung Ho; Cho, Woo Kyung

2015-12-01

The advanced technologies available for micro/nanofabrication have opened new avenues for interdisciplinary approaches to solve the unmet medical needs of regenerative medicine and biomedical devices. This review highlights the recent developments in micro/nanostructured adhesives and films for biomedical applications, including waterproof seals for wounds or surgery sites, drug delivery, sensing human body signals, and optical imaging of human tissues. We describe in detail the fabrication processes required to prepare the adhesives and films, such as tape-based adhesives, nanofilms, and flexible and stretchable film-based electronic devices. We also discuss their biomedical functions, performance in vitro and in vivo, and the future research needed to improve the current systems.

The biomedical disciplines and the structure of biomedical and clinical knowledge.

Science.gov (United States)

Nederbragt, H

2000-11-01

The relation between biomedical knowledge and clinical knowledge is discussed by comparing their respective structures. The knowledge of a disease as a biological phenomenon is constructed by the interaction of facts and theories from the main biomedical disciplines: epidemiology, diagnostics, clinical trial, therapy development and pathogenesis. Although these facts and theories are based on probabilities and extrapolations, the interaction provides a reliable and coherent structure, comparable to a Kuhnian paradigma. In the structure of clinical knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the patient with the disease, not only biomedical knowledge contributes to the structure but also economic and social relations, ethics and personal experience. However, the interaction between each of the participating "knowledges" in clinical knowledge is not based on mutual dependency and accumulation of different arguments from each, as in biomedical knowledge, but on competition and partial exclusion. Therefore, the structure of biomedical knowledge is different from that of clinical knowledge. This difference is used as the basis for a discussion in which the place of technology, evidence-based medicine and the gap between scientific and clinical knowledge are evaluated.

3D printing – a key technology for tailored biomedical cell culture lab ware

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Schmieder Florian

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Today’s 3D printing technologies offer great possibilities for biomedical researchers to create their own specific laboratory equipment. With respect to the generation of ex vivo vascular perfusion systems this will enable new types of products that will embed complex 3D structures possibly coupled with cell loaded scaffolds closely reflecting the in-vivo environment. Moreover this could lead to microfluidic devices that should be available in small numbers of pieces at moderate prices. Here, we will present first results of such 3D printed cell culture systems made from plastics and show their use for scaffold based applications.

Introduction to biomedical engineering technology

CERN Document Server

Street, Laurence J

2011-01-01

IntroductionHistory of Medical DevicesThe Role of Biomedical Engineering Technologists in Health CareCharacteristics of Human Anatomy and Physiology That Relate to Medical DevicesSummaryQuestionsDiagnostic Devices: Part OnePhysiological Monitoring SystemsThe HeartSummaryQuestionsDiagnostic Devices: Part TwoCirculatory System and BloodRespiratory SystemNervous SystemSummaryQuestionsDiagnostic Devices: Part ThreeDigestive SystemSensory OrgansReproductionSkin, Bone, Muscle, MiscellaneousChapter SummaryQuestionsDiagnostic ImagingIntroductionX-RaysMagnetic Resonance Imaging ScannersPositron Emissio

e-Science platform for translational biomedical imaging research: running, statistics, and analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Tusheng; Yang, Yuanyuan; Zhang, Kai; Wang, Mingqing; Zhao, Jun; Xu, Lisa; Zhang, Jianguo

2015-03-01

In order to enable multiple disciplines of medical researchers, clinical physicians and biomedical engineers working together in a secured, efficient, and transparent cooperative environment, we had designed an e-Science platform for biomedical imaging research and application cross multiple academic institutions and hospitals in Shanghai and presented this work in SPIE Medical Imaging conference held in San Diego in 2012. In past the two-years, we implemented a biomedical image chain including communication, storage, cooperation and computing based on this e-Science platform. In this presentation, we presented the operating status of this system in supporting biomedical imaging research, analyzed and discussed results of this system in supporting multi-disciplines collaboration cross-multiple institutions.

Culture and biomedical care in Africa: the influence of culture on biomedical care in a traditional African society, Nigeria, West Africa.

Science.gov (United States)

Chukwuneke, F N; Ezeonu, C T; Onyire, B N; Ezeonu, P O

2012-01-01

Biomedical Care in Africa and the influence of culture on the health-seeking behaviour of Africans can not be underestimated; many African cultures have different understanding of the causes of disease which more often affect our public health system, policy, planning and implementations. The traditional African healer unlike a doctor trained in western biomedicine, looks for the cause of the patient's ailments as misfortune in relationship between the patient and the social, natural and spiritual environments. The complexity of African society with different cultural and religious practices also reflects on the people's attitude and understanding of their health matters. This paper is an overview of the cultural influence on biomedical care in a traditional African society, Nigeria, West Africa. A research on the patients' health seeking behaviour and Primary Health Care service organization in 10 health centres in the five eastern states of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was carried out using a multistage cross-sectional study. A semi-structured questionnaire was administered to the health care providers and patients while an in-depth semi- structured interview was also conducted. We observed there is underutilization of health care services at the primary level because most people do not accept the model of health care system provided for them. Most people believe diseases are caused by supernatural beings, the handiwork of neighbours or vengeance from an offended god as a result of transgressions committed in the past by an individual or parents. This group of people therefore prefers seeking traditional medicine to seeking orthodox medicine and often ends up in the hands of witch doctors who claim to have cure to almost all the diseases. Biomedical care in Africa is influence by culture because of different understanding of what ailment is and also due to limited knowledge of health matters, poverty and ignorance. There is a need therefore to focus on health

Biomedical signals, imaging, and informatics

CERN Document Server

Bronzino, Joseph D

2014-01-01

Known as the bible of biomedical engineering, The Biomedical Engineering Handbook, Fourth Edition, sets the standard against which all other references of this nature are measured. As such, it has served as a major resource for both skilled professionals and novices to biomedical engineering.Biomedical Signals, Imaging, and Informatics, the third volume of the handbook, presents material from respected scientists with diverse backgrounds in biosignal processing, medical imaging, infrared imaging, and medical informatics.More than three dozen specific topics are examined, including biomedical s

The importance of Zebrafish in biomedical research.

Science.gov (United States)

Tavares, Bárbara; Santos Lopes, Susana

2013-01-01

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is an ideal model organism for the study of vertebrate development. This is due to the large clutches that each couple produces, with up to 200 embryos every 7 days, and to the fact that the embryos and larvae are small, transparent and undergo rapid external development. Using scientific literature research tools available online and the keywords Zebrafish, biomedical research, human disease, and drug screening, we reviewed original studies and reviews indexed in PubMed. In this review we summarized work conducted with this model for the advancement of our knowledge related to several human diseases. We also focused on the biomedical research being performed in Portugal with the zebrafish model. Powerful live imaging and genetic tools are currently available for zebrafish making it a valuable model in biomedical research. The combination of these properties with the optimization of automated systems for drug screening has transformed the zebrafish into "a top model" in biomedical research, drug discovery and toxicity testing. Furthermore, with the optimization of xenografts technology it will be possible to use zebrafish to aide in the choice of the best therapy for each patient. Zebrafish is an excellent model organism in biomedical research, drug development and in clinical therapy.

Powering biomedical devices

CERN Document Server

Romero, Edwar

2013-01-01

From exoskeletons to neural implants, biomedical devices are no less than life-changing. Compact and constant power sources are necessary to keep these devices running efficiently. Edwar Romero's Powering Biomedical Devices reviews the background, current technologies, and possible future developments of these power sources, examining not only the types of biomedical power sources available (macro, mini, MEMS, and nano), but also what they power (such as prostheses, insulin pumps, and muscular and neural stimulators), and how they work (covering batteries, biofluids, kinetic and ther

BioCause: Annotating and analysing causality in the biomedical domain.

Science.gov (United States)

Mihăilă, Claudiu; Ohta, Tomoko; Pyysalo, Sampo; Ananiadou, Sophia

2013-01-16

Biomedical corpora annotated with event-level information represent an important resource for domain-specific information extraction (IE) systems. However, bio-event annotation alone cannot cater for all the needs of biologists. Unlike work on relation and event extraction, most of which focusses on specific events and named entities, we aim to build a comprehensive resource, covering all statements of causal association present in discourse. Causality lies at the heart of biomedical knowledge, such as diagnosis, pathology or systems biology, and, thus, automatic causality recognition can greatly reduce the human workload by suggesting possible causal connections and aiding in the curation of pathway models. A biomedical text corpus annotated with such relations is, hence, crucial for developing and evaluating biomedical text mining. We have defined an annotation scheme for enriching biomedical domain corpora with causality relations. This schema has subsequently been used to annotate 851 causal relations to form BioCause, a collection of 19 open-access full-text biomedical journal articles belonging to the subdomain of infectious diseases. These documents have been pre-annotated with named entity and event information in the context of previous shared tasks. We report an inter-annotator agreement rate of over 60% for triggers and of over 80% for arguments using an exact match constraint. These increase significantly using a relaxed match setting. Moreover, we analyse and describe the causality relations in BioCause from various points of view. This information can then be leveraged for the training of automatic causality detection systems. Augmenting named entity and event annotations with information about causal discourse relations could benefit the development of more sophisticated IE systems. These will further influence the development of multiple tasks, such as enabling textual inference to detect entailments, discovering new facts and providing new

BioSTEC 2017: 10th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies : Proceedings Volume 5: HealthInf

NARCIS (Netherlands)

2017-01-01

This book contains the proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2017). This conference is sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), in cooperation with the ACM

[Integration of fundamental and applied medical and technical research made at the department of the biomedical systems, Moscow State Institute of Electronic Engineering].

Science.gov (United States)

Selishchev, S V

2004-01-01

The integration results of fundamental and applied medical-and-technical research made at the chair of biomedical systems, Moscow state institute of electronic engineering (technical university--MSIEE), are described in the paper. The chair is guided in its research activity by the traditions of higher education in Russia in the field of biomedical electronics and biomedical engineering. Its activities are based on the extrapolation of methods of electronic tools, computer technologies, physics, biology and medicine with due respect being paid to the requirements of practical medicine and to topical issues of research and design.

Concussion As a Multi-Scale Complex System: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis of Current Knowledge

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Erin S. Kenzie

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Traumatic brain injury (TBI has been called “the most complicated disease of the most complex organ of the body” and is an increasingly high-profile public health issue. Many patients report long-term impairments following even “mild” injuries, but reliable criteria for diagnosis and prognosis are lacking. Every clinical trial for TBI treatment to date has failed to demonstrate reliable and safe improvement in outcomes, and the existing body of literature is insufficient to support the creation of a new classification system. Concussion, or mild TBI, is a highly heterogeneous phenomenon, and numerous factors interact dynamically to influence an individual’s recovery trajectory. Many of the obstacles faced in research and clinical practice related to TBI and concussion, including observed heterogeneity, arguably stem from the complexity of the condition itself. To improve understanding of this complexity, we review the current state of research through the lens provided by the interdisciplinary field of systems science, which has been increasingly applied to biomedical issues. The review was conducted iteratively, through multiple phases of literature review, expert interviews, and systems diagramming and represents the first phase in an effort to develop systems models of concussion. The primary focus of this work was to examine concepts and ways of thinking about concussion that currently impede research design and block advancements in care of TBI. Results are presented in the form of a multi-scale conceptual framework intended to synthesize knowledge across disciplines, improve research design, and provide a broader, multi-scale model for understanding concussion pathophysiology, classification, and treatment.

Compound image segmentation of published biomedical figures.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Pengyuan; Jiang, Xiangying; Kambhamettu, Chandra; Shatkay, Hagit

2018-04-01

Images convey essential information in biomedical publications. As such, there is a growing interest within the bio-curation and the bio-databases communities, to store images within publications as evidence for biomedical processes and for experimental results. However, many of the images in biomedical publications are compound images consisting of multiple panels, where each individual panel potentially conveys a different type of information. Segmenting such images into constituent panels is an essential first step toward utilizing images. In this article, we develop a new compound image segmentation system, FigSplit, which is based on Connected Component Analysis. To overcome shortcomings typically manifested by existing methods, we develop a quality assessment step for evaluating and modifying segmentations. Two methods are proposed to re-segment the images if the initial segmentation is inaccurate. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method compared with other methods. The system is publicly available for use at: https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~compbio/FigSplit. The code is available upon request. shatkay@udel.edu. Supplementary data are available online at Bioinformatics.

Multiscale computer modeling in biomechanics and biomedical engineering

CERN Document Server

2013-01-01

This book reviews the state-of-the-art in multiscale computer modeling, in terms of both accomplishments and challenges. The information in the book is particularly useful for biomedical engineers, medical physicists and researchers in systems biology, mathematical biology, micro-biomechanics and biomaterials who are interested in how to bridge between traditional biomedical engineering work at the organ and tissue scales, and the newer arenas of cellular and molecular bioengineering.

Closing the loops in biomedical informatics from theory to daily practice.

Science.gov (United States)

Gaudinat, A

2009-01-01

This article presents the 2009 selection of the best papers in the special section dedicated to biomedical informatics and cybernetics. Synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA yearbook 2009 Five papers from international peer reviewed journals where selected for this section. Most of the papers have a strong practical orientation in clinical care. And this selection gives a good overview of what is done with "closing loop" approach, particularly during the year 2008. While quite mature for some clinical applications such as mechanical ventilation, it remains a challenge where rules for the decision system could be difficult to identify due to the number of variables. More complex systems with greater Artificial Intelligence approaches will certainly be the next trend for closed-loop applications.

1st European Biomedical Engineering Conference for Young Investigators

CERN Document Server

2015-01-01

 This volume presents the proceedings of the first European Biomedical Engineering Conference for Young Investigators ENCY2015. It was in Budapest, from 28th to 30th May, 2015. The papers were assembled under the motto "Understanding complex living systems” and cover the topics sensors, image processing, bioinformatics, biomechanics, and modeling.

Generalized Combination Complex Synchronization for Fractional-Order Chaotic Complex Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cuimei Jiang

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Based on two fractional-order chaotic complex drive systems and one fractional-order chaotic complex response system with different dimensions, we propose generalized combination complex synchronization. In this new synchronization scheme, there are two complex scaling matrices that are non-square matrices. On the basis of the stability theory of fractional-order linear systems, we design a general controller via active control. Additionally, by virtue of two complex scaling matrices, generalized combination complex synchronization between fractional-order chaotic complex systems and real systems is investigated. Finally, three typical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the schemes.

Wireless plataforms for the monitoring of biomedical variables

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bianco, Roman; Laprovitta, AgustIn; Misa, Alberto; Toselli, Eduardo; Castagnola, Juan Luis

2007-01-01

The present paper aims to analyze and to compare two wireless platforms for the monitoring of biomedical variables. They must obtain the vital signals of the patients, transmit them through a radio frequency bond and centralize them for their process, storage and monitoring in real time. The implementation of this system permit us to obtain two important benefits; The patient will enjoy greater comfort during the internment, and the doctors will be able to know the state of the biomedical variables of each patient, in simultaneous form. In order to achieve the objective of this work, two communication systems for wireless transmissions data were developed and implemented. The CC1000 transceiver was used in the first system and the Bluetooth module was used in the other system

Wireless plataforms for the monitoring of biomedical variables

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bianco, Roman; Laprovitta, AgustIn; Misa, Alberto; Toselli, Eduardo; Castagnola, Juan Luis [Laboratory of Communications and Electronics, Catholic University of Cordoba (Argentina)

2007-11-15

The present paper aims to analyze and to compare two wireless platforms for the monitoring of biomedical variables. They must obtain the vital signals of the patients, transmit them through a radio frequency bond and centralize them for their process, storage and monitoring in real time. The implementation of this system permit us to obtain two important benefits; The patient will enjoy greater comfort during the internment, and the doctors will be able to know the state of the biomedical variables of each patient, in simultaneous form. In order to achieve the objective of this work, two communication systems for wireless transmissions data were developed and implemented. The CC1000 transceiver was used in the first system and the Bluetooth module was used in the other system.

Wireless plataforms for the monitoring of biomedical variables

Science.gov (United States)

Bianco, Román; Laprovitta, Agustín; Misa, Alberto; Toselli, Eduardo; Castagnola, Juan Luis

2007-11-01

The present paper aims to analyze and to compare two wireless platforms for the monitoring of biomedical variables. They must obtain the vital signals of the patients, transmit them through a radio frequency bond and centralize them for their process, storage and monitoring in real time. The implementation of this system permit us to obtain two important benefits; The patient will enjoy greater comfort during the internment, and the doctors will be able to know the state of the biomedical variables of each patient, in simultaneous form. In order to achieve the objective of this work, two communication systems for wireless transmissions data were developed and implemented. The CC1000 transceiver was used in the first system and the Bluetooth module was used in the other system.

A Novel Approach to Physiology Education for Biomedical Engineering Students

Science.gov (United States)

DiCecco, J.; Wu, J.; Kuwasawa, K.; Sun, Y.

2007-01-01

It is challenging for biomedical engineering programs to incorporate an indepth study of the systemic interdependence of cells, tissues, and organs into the rigorous mathematical curriculum that is the cornerstone of engineering education. To be sure, many biomedical engineering programs require their students to enroll in anatomy and physiology…

Character-level neural network for biomedical named entity recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Gridach, Mourad

2017-06-01

Biomedical named entity recognition (BNER), which extracts important named entities such as genes and proteins, is a challenging task in automated systems that mine knowledge in biomedical texts. The previous state-of-the-art systems required large amounts of task-specific knowledge in the form of feature engineering, lexicons and data pre-processing to achieve high performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural network architecture that benefits from both word- and character-level representations automatically, by using a combination of bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) and conditional random field (CRF) eliminating the need for most feature engineering tasks. We evaluate our system on two datasets: JNLPBA corpus and the BioCreAtIvE II Gene Mention (GM) corpus. We obtained state-of-the-art performance by outperforming the previous systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the combination of deep neural networks, CRF, word embeddings and character-level representation in recognizing biomedical named entities. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Interactive Processing and Visualization of Image Data forBiomedical and Life Science Applications

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Staadt, Oliver G.; Natarjan, Vijay; Weber, Gunther H.; Wiley,David F.; Hamann, Bernd

2007-02-01

Background: Applications in biomedical science and life science produce large data sets using increasingly powerful imaging devices and computer simulations. It is becoming increasingly difficult for scientists to explore and analyze these data using traditional tools. Interactive data processing and visualization tools can support scientists to overcome these limitations. Results: We show that new data processing tools and visualization systems can be used successfully in biomedical and life science applications. We present an adaptive high-resolution display system suitable for biomedical image data, algorithms for analyzing and visualization protein surfaces and retinal optical coherence tomography data, and visualization tools for 3D gene expression data. Conclusion: We demonstrated that interactive processing and visualization methods and systems can support scientists in a variety of biomedical and life science application areas concerned with massive data analysis.

Visualization of biomedical image data and irradiation planning using a parallel computing system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lehrig, R.

1991-01-01

The contribution explains the development of a novel, low-cost workstation for the processing of biomedical tomographic data sequences. The workstation was to allow both graphical display of the data and implementation of modelling software for irradiation planning, especially for calculation of dose distributions on the basis of the measured tomogram data. The system developed according to these criteria is a parallel computing system which performs secondary, two-dimensional image reconstructions irrespective of the imaging direction of the original tomographic scans. Three-dimensional image reconstructions can be generated from any direction of view, with random selection of sections of the scanned object. (orig./MM) With 69 figs., 2 tabs [de

Survey of biomedical and environental data bases, models, and integrated computer systems at Argonne National Laboratory

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Murarka, I.P.; Bodeau, D.J.; Scott, J.M.; Huebner, R.H.

1978-08-01

This document contains an inventory (index) of information resources pertaining to biomedical and environmental projects at Argonne National Laboratory--the information resources include a data base, model, or integrated computer system. Entries are categorized as models, numeric data bases, bibliographic data bases, or integrated hardware/software systems. Descriptions of the Information Coordination Focal Point (ICFP) program, the system for compiling this inventory, and the plans for continuing and expanding it are given, and suggestions for utilizing the services of the ICFP are outlined

Survey of biomedical and environental data bases, models, and integrated computer systems at Argonne National Laboratory

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Murarka, I.P.; Bodeau, D.J.; Scott, J.M.; Huebner, R.H.

1978-08-01

This document contains an inventory (index) of information resources pertaining to biomedical and environmental projects at Argonne National Laboratory--the information resources include a data base, model, or integrated computer system. Entries are categorized as models, numeric data bases, bibliographic data bases, or integrated hardware/software systems. Descriptions of the Information Coordination Focal Point (ICFP) program, the system for compiling this inventory, and the plans for continuing and expanding it are given, and suggestions for utilizing the services of the ICFP are outlined.

Nanodiamond-Based Composite Structures for Biomedical Imaging and Drug Delivery.

Science.gov (United States)

Rosenholm, Jessica M; Vlasov, Igor I; Burikov, Sergey A; Dolenko, Tatiana A; Shenderova, Olga A

2015-02-01

Nanodiamond particles are widely recognized candidates for biomedical applications due to their excellent biocompatibility, bright photoluminescence based on color centers and outstanding photostability. Recently, more complex architectures with a nanodiamond core and an external shell or nanostructure which provides synergistic benefits have been developed, and their feasibility for biomedical applications has been demonstrated. This review is aimed at summarizing recent achievements in the fabrication and functional demonstrations of nanodiamond-based composite structures, along with critical considerations that should be taken into account in the design of such structures from a biomedical point of view. A particular focus of the review is core/shell structures of nanodiamond surrounded by porous silica shells, which demonstrate a remarkable increase in drug loading efficiency; as well as nanodiamonds decorated with carbon dots, which have excellent potential as bioimaging probes. Other combinations are also considered, relying on the discussed inherent properties of the inorganic materials being integrated in a way to advance inorganic nanomedicine in the quest for better health-related nanotechnology.

Biomedical ontologies: toward scientific debate.

Science.gov (United States)

Maojo, V; Crespo, J; García-Remesal, M; de la Iglesia, D; Perez-Rey, D; Kulikowski, C

2011-01-01

Biomedical ontologies have been very successful in structuring knowledge for many different applications, receiving widespread praise for their utility and potential. Yet, the role of computational ontologies in scientific research, as opposed to knowledge management applications, has not been extensively discussed. We aim to stimulate further discussion on the advantages and challenges presented by biomedical ontologies from a scientific perspective. We review various aspects of biomedical ontologies going beyond their practical successes, and focus on some key scientific questions in two ways. First, we analyze and discuss current approaches to improve biomedical ontologies that are based largely on classical, Aristotelian ontological models of reality. Second, we raise various open questions about biomedical ontologies that require further research, analyzing in more detail those related to visual reasoning and spatial ontologies. We outline significant scientific issues that biomedical ontologies should consider, beyond current efforts of building practical consensus between them. For spatial ontologies, we suggest an approach for building "morphospatial" taxonomies, as an example that could stimulate research on fundamental open issues for biomedical ontologies. Analysis of a large number of problems with biomedical ontologies suggests that the field is very much open to alternative interpretations of current work, and in need of scientific debate and discussion that can lead to new ideas and research directions.

Assessing the practice of biomedical ontology evaluation: Gaps and opportunities.

Science.gov (United States)

Amith, Muhammad; He, Zhe; Bian, Jiang; Lossio-Ventura, Juan Antonio; Tao, Cui

2018-04-01

With the proliferation of heterogeneous health care data in the last three decades, biomedical ontologies and controlled biomedical terminologies play a more and more important role in knowledge representation and management, data integration, natural language processing, as well as decision support for health information systems and biomedical research. Biomedical ontologies and controlled terminologies are intended to assure interoperability. Nevertheless, the quality of biomedical ontologies has hindered their applicability and subsequent adoption in real-world applications. Ontology evaluation is an integral part of ontology development and maintenance. In the biomedicine domain, ontology evaluation is often conducted by third parties as a quality assurance (or auditing) effort that focuses on identifying modeling errors and inconsistencies. In this work, we first organized four categorical schemes of ontology evaluation methods in the existing literature to create an integrated taxonomy. Further, to understand the ontology evaluation practice in the biomedicine domain, we reviewed a sample of 200 ontologies from the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal-the largest repository for biomedical ontologies-and observed that only 15 of these ontologies have documented evaluation in their corresponding inception papers. We then surveyed the recent quality assurance approaches for biomedical ontologies and their use. We also mapped these quality assurance approaches to the ontology evaluation criteria. It is our anticipation that ontology evaluation and quality assurance approaches will be more widely adopted in the development life cycle of biomedical ontologies. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Carbon nanotubes from synthesis to in vivo biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Sajid, Muhammad Imran; Jamshaid, Usama; Jamshaid, Talha; Zafar, Nadiah; Fessi, H; Elaissari, Abdelhamid

2016-03-30

Owing to their unique and interesting properties, extensive research round the globe has been carried out on carbon nanotubes and carbon nanotubes based systems to investigate their practical usefulness in biomedical applications. The results from these studies demonstrate a great promise in their use in targeted drug delivery systems, diagnostic techniques and in bio-analytical applications. Although, carbon nanotubes possess quite interesting properties, which make them potential candidates in the biomedical science, but they also have some inherent properties which arise great concern regarding their biosafety. In this comprehensive review, we have discussed different aspects of carbon nanotubes and carbon nanotube based systems related to biomedical applications. In the beginning, a short historical account of these tiny yet powerful particles is given followed by discussion regarding their types, properties, methods of synthesis, large scale production method, purification techniques and characterization aspects of carbon nanotubes. In the second part of the review, the functionalization of carbon nanotubes is reviewed in detail, which is not only important to make them biocompatible and stable in biological systems but also render them a great property of loading various biomolecules, diagnostic and therapeutic moieties resulting in diversified applications. In the final part of the review, emphasis is given on the pharmacokinetic aspects of carbon nanotubes including administration routes, absorption mechanisms, distribution and elimination of carbon nanotubes based systems. Lastly, a comprehensive account about the potential biomedical applications has been given followed by insights into the future. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Biomedical waste management in Ayurveda hospitals - current practices & future prospectives.

Science.gov (United States)

Rajan, Renju; Robin, Delvin T; M, Vandanarani

2018-03-16

Biomedical waste management is an integral part of traditional and contemporary system of health care. The paper focuses on the identification and classification of biomedical wastes in Ayurvedic hospitals, current practices of its management in Ayurveda hospitals and its future prospective. Databases like PubMed (1975-2017 Feb), Scopus (1960-2017), AYUSH Portal, DOAJ, DHARA and Google scholar were searched. We used the medical subject headings 'biomedical waste' and 'health care waste' for identification and classification. The terms 'biomedical waste management', 'health care waste management' alone and combined with 'Ayurveda' or 'Ayurvedic' for current practices and recent advances in the treatment of these wastes were used. We made a humble attempt to categorize the biomedical wastes from Ayurvedic hospitals as the available data about its grouping is very scarce. Proper biomedical waste management is the mainstay of hospital cleanliness, hospital hygiene and maintenance activities. Current disposal techniques adopted for Ayurveda biomedical wastes are - sewage/drains, incineration and land fill. But these methods are having some merits as well as demerits. Our review has identified a number of interesting areas for future research such as the logical application of bioremediation techniques in biomedical waste management and the usage of effective micro-organisms and solar energy in waste disposal. Copyright © 2017 Transdisciplinary University, Bangalore and World Ayurveda Foundation. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Compensatory neurofuzzy model for discrete data classification in biomedical

Science.gov (United States)

Ceylan, Rahime

2015-03-01

Biomedical data is separated to two main sections: signals and discrete data. So, studies in this area are about biomedical signal classification or biomedical discrete data classification. There are artificial intelligence models which are relevant to classification of ECG, EMG or EEG signals. In same way, in literature, many models exist for classification of discrete data taken as value of samples which can be results of blood analysis or biopsy in medical process. Each algorithm could not achieve high accuracy rate on classification of signal and discrete data. In this study, compensatory neurofuzzy network model is presented for classification of discrete data in biomedical pattern recognition area. The compensatory neurofuzzy network has a hybrid and binary classifier. In this system, the parameters of fuzzy systems are updated by backpropagation algorithm. The realized classifier model is conducted to two benchmark datasets (Wisconsin Breast Cancer dataset and Pima Indian Diabetes dataset). Experimental studies show that compensatory neurofuzzy network model achieved 96.11% accuracy rate in classification of breast cancer dataset and 69.08% accuracy rate was obtained in experiments made on diabetes dataset with only 10 iterations.

Biomedical signal and image processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Cerutti, Sergio; Baselli, Giuseppe; Bianchi, Anna; Caiani, Enrico; Contini, Davide; Cubeddu, Rinaldo; Dercole, Fabio; Rienzo, Luca; Liberati, Diego; Mainardi, Luca; Ravazzani, Paolo; Rinaldi, Sergio; Signorini, Maria; Torricelli, Alessandro

2011-01-01

Generally, physiological modeling and biomedical signal processing constitute two important paradigms of biomedical engineering (BME): their fundamental concepts are taught starting from undergraduate studies and are more completely dealt with in the last years of graduate curricula, as well as in Ph.D. courses. Traditionally, these two cultural aspects were separated, with the first one more oriented to physiological issues and how to model them and the second one more dedicated to the development of processing tools or algorithms to enhance useful information from clinical data. A practical consequence was that those who did models did not do signal processing and vice versa. However, in recent years,the need for closer integration between signal processing and modeling of the relevant biological systems emerged very clearly [1], [2]. This is not only true for training purposes(i.e., to properly prepare the new professional members of BME) but also for the development of newly conceived research projects in which the integration between biomedical signal and image processing (BSIP) and modeling plays a crucial role. Just to give simple examples, topics such as brain–computer machine or interfaces,neuroengineering, nonlinear dynamical analysis of the cardiovascular (CV) system,integration of sensory-motor characteristics aimed at the building of advanced prostheses and rehabilitation tools, and wearable devices for vital sign monitoring and others do require an intelligent fusion of modeling and signal processing competences that are certainly peculiar of our discipline of BME.

Magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical applications

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Krustev, P.; Ruskov, T.

2007-01-01

In this paper we describe different biomedical application using magnetic nanoparticles. Over the past decade, a number of biomedical applications have begun to emerge for magnetic nanoparticles of differing sizes, shapes, and compositions. Areas under investigation include targeted drug delivery, ultra-sensitive disease detection, gene therapy, high throughput genetic screening, biochemical sensing, and rapid toxicity cleansing. Magnetic nanoparticles exhibit ferromagnetic or superparamagnetic behavior, magnetizing strongly under an applied field. In the second case (superparamagnetic nanoparticles) there is no permanent magnetism once the field is removed. The superparamagnetic nanoparticles are highly attractive as in vivo probes or in vitro tools to extract information on biochemical systems. The optical properties of magnetic metal nanoparticles are spectacular and, therefore, have promoted a great deal of excitement during the last few decades. Many applications as MRI imaging and hyperthermia rely on the use of iron oxide particles. Moreover magnetic nanoparticles conjugated with antibodies are also applied to hyperthermia and have enabled tumor specific contrast enhancement in MRI. Other promising biomedical applications are connected with tumor cells treated with magnetic nanoparticles with X-ray ionizing radiation, which employs magnetic nanoparticles as a complementary radiate source inside the tumor. (authors)

Biomedical sensor technologies on the platform of mobile phones

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Lin; Liu, Jing

2011-06-01

Biomedical sensors have been widely used in various areas of biomedical practices, which play an important role in disease detection, diagnosis, monitoring, treatment, health management, and so on. However, most of them and their related platforms are generally not easily accessible or just too expensive or complicated to be kept at home. As an alternative, new technologies enabled from the mobile phones are gradually changing such situations. As can be freely available to almost everyone, mobile phone offers a unique way to improve the conventional medical care through combining with various biomedical sensors. Moreover, the established systems will be both convenient and low cost. In this paper, we present an overview on the state-of-art biomedical sensors, giving a brief introduction of the fundamental principles and showing several new examples or concepts in the area. The focus was particularly put on interpreting the technical strategies to innovate the biomedical sensor technologies based on the platform of mobile phones. Some challenging issues, including feasibility, usability, security, and effectiveness, were discussed. With the help of electrical and mechanical technologies, it is expected that a full combination between the biomedical sensors and mobile phones will bring a bright future for the coming pervasive medical care.

Multiscale integration of -omic, imaging, and clinical data in biomedical informatics.

Science.gov (United States)

Phan, John H; Quo, Chang F; Cheng, Chihwen; Wang, May Dongmei

2012-01-01

This paper reviews challenges and opportunities in multiscale data integration for biomedical informatics. Biomedical data can come from different biological origins, data acquisition technologies, and clinical applications. Integrating such data across multiple scales (e.g., molecular, cellular/tissue, and patient) can lead to more informed decisions for personalized, predictive, and preventive medicine. However, data heterogeneity, community standards in data acquisition, and computational complexity are big challenges for such decision making. This review describes genomic and proteomic (i.e., molecular), histopathological imaging (i.e., cellular/tissue), and clinical (i.e., patient) data; it includes case studies for single-scale (e.g., combining genomic or histopathological image data), multiscale (e.g., combining histopathological image and clinical data), and multiscale and multiplatform (e.g., the Human Protein Atlas and The Cancer Genome Atlas) data integration. Numerous opportunities exist in biomedical informatics research focusing on integration of multiscale and multiplatform data.

Empirical and theoretical analysis of complex systems

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Guannan

This thesis is an interdisciplinary work under the heading of complexity science which focuses on an arguably common "hard" problem across physics, finance and biology [1], to quantify and mimic the macroscopic "emergent phenomenon" in large-scale systems consisting of many interacting "particles" governed by microscopic rules. In contrast to traditional statistical physics, we are interested in systems whose dynamics are subject to feedback, evolution, adaption, openness, etc. Global financial markets, like the stock market and currency market, are ideal candidate systems for such a complexity study: there exists a vast amount of accurate data, which is the aggregate output of many autonomous agents continuously competing with each other. We started by examining the ultrafast "mini flash crash (MFC)" events in the US stock market. An abrupt system-wide composition transition from a mixed human machine phase to a new all-machine phase is uncovered, and a novel theory developed to explain this observation. Then in the study of FX market, we found an unexpected variation in the synchronicity of price changes in different market subsections as a function of the overall trading activity. Several survival models have been tested in analyzing the distribution of waiting times to the next price change. In the region of long waiting-times, the distribution for each currency pair exhibits a power law with exponent in the vicinity of 3.5. By contrast, for short waiting times only, the market activity can be mimicked by the fluctuations emerging from a finite resource competition model containing multiple agents with limited rationality (so called El Farol Model). Switching to the biomedical domain, we present a minimal mathematical model built around a co-evolving resource network and cell population, yielding good agreement with primary tumors in mice experiment and with clinical metastasis data. In the quest to understand contagion phenomena in systems where social group

Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems (CASOS) engineering environment.

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Detry, Richard Joseph; Linebarger, John Michael; Finley, Patrick D.; Maffitt, S. Louise; Glass, Robert John, Jr.; Beyeler, Walter Eugene; Ames, Arlo Leroy

2012-02-01

Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems, or CASoS, are vastly complex physical-socio-technical systems which we must understand to design a secure future for the nation. The Phoenix initiative implements CASoS Engineering principles combining the bottom up Complex Systems and Complex Adaptive Systems view with the top down Systems Engineering and System-of-Systems view. CASoS Engineering theory and practice must be conducted together to develop a discipline that is grounded in reality, extends our understanding of how CASoS behave and allows us to better control the outcomes. The pull of applications (real world problems) is critical to this effort, as is the articulation of a CASoS Engineering Framework that grounds an engineering approach in the theory of complex adaptive systems of systems. Successful application of the CASoS Engineering Framework requires modeling, simulation and analysis (MS and A) capabilities and the cultivation of a CASoS Engineering Community of Practice through knowledge sharing and facilitation. The CASoS Engineering Environment, itself a complex adaptive system of systems, constitutes the two platforms that provide these capabilities.

Finding and Accessing Diagrams in Biomedical Publications

OpenAIRE

Kuhn, Tobias; Luong, ThaiBinh; Krauthammer, Michael

2012-01-01

Complex relationships in biomedical publications are often communicated by diagrams such as bar and line charts, which are a very effective way of summarizing and communicating multi-faceted data sets. Given the ever-increasing amount of published data, we argue that the precise retrieval of such diagrams is of great value for answering specific and otherwise hard-to-meet information needs. To this end, we demonstrate the use of advanced image processing and classification for identifying bar...

Building a biomedical cyberinfrastructure for collaborative research.

Science.gov (United States)

Schad, Peter A; Mobley, Lee Rivers; Hamilton, Carol M

2011-05-01

For the potential power of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and translational medicine to be realized, the biomedical research community must adopt standard measures, vocabularies, and systems to establish an extensible biomedical cyberinfrastructure. Incorporating standard measures will greatly facilitate combining and comparing studies via meta-analysis. Incorporating consensus-based and well-established measures into various studies should reduce the variability across studies due to attributes of measurement, making findings across studies more comparable. This article describes two well-established consensus-based approaches to identifying standard measures and systems: PhenX (consensus measures for phenotypes and eXposures), and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). NIH support for these efforts has produced the PhenX Toolkit, an assembled catalog of standard measures for use in GWAS and other large-scale genomic research efforts, and the RTI Spatial Impact Factor Database (SIFD), a comprehensive repository of geo-referenced variables and extensive meta-data that conforms to OGC standards. The need for coordinated development of cyberinfrastructure to support measures and systems that enhance collaboration and data interoperability is clear; this paper includes a discussion of standard protocols for ensuring data compatibility and interoperability. Adopting a cyberinfrastructure that includes standard measures and vocabularies, and open-source systems architecture, such as the two well-established systems discussed here, will enhance the potential of future biomedical and translational research. Establishing and maintaining the cyberinfrastructure will require a fundamental change in the way researchers think about study design, collaboration, and data storage and analysis. Copyright © 2011 American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

15th International Conference on Biomedical Engineering

CERN Document Server

2014-01-01

This volume presents the proceedings of the 15th ICMBE held from 4th to 7th December 2013, Singapore. Biomedical engineering is applied in most aspects of our healthcare ecosystem. From electronic health records to diagnostic tools to therapeutic, rehabilitative and regenerative treatments, the work of biomedical engineers is evident. Biomedical engineers work at the intersection of engineering, life sciences and healthcare. The engineers would use principles from applied science including mechanical, electrical, chemical and computer engineering together with physical sciences including physics, chemistry and mathematics to apply them to biology and medicine. Applying such concepts to the human body is very much the same concepts that go into building and programming a machine. The goal is to better understand, replace or fix a target system to ultimately improve the quality of healthcare. With this understanding, the conference proceedings offer a single platform for individuals and organisations working i...

BEST: Next-Generation Biomedical Entity Search Tool for Knowledge Discovery from Biomedical Literature.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sunwon Lee

Full Text Available As the volume of publications rapidly increases, searching for relevant information from the literature becomes more challenging. To complement standard search engines such as PubMed, it is desirable to have an advanced search tool that directly returns relevant biomedical entities such as targets, drugs, and mutations rather than a long list of articles. Some existing tools submit a query to PubMed and process retrieved abstracts to extract information at query time, resulting in a slow response time and limited coverage of only a fraction of the PubMed corpus. Other tools preprocess the PubMed corpus to speed up the response time; however, they are not constantly updated, and thus produce outdated results. Further, most existing tools cannot process sophisticated queries such as searches for mutations that co-occur with query terms in the literature. To address these problems, we introduce BEST, a biomedical entity search tool. BEST returns, as a result, a list of 10 different types of biomedical entities including genes, diseases, drugs, targets, transcription factors, miRNAs, and mutations that are relevant to a user's query. To the best of our knowledge, BEST is the only system that processes free text queries and returns up-to-date results in real time including mutation information in the results. BEST is freely accessible at http://best.korea.ac.kr.

Rules and management of biomedical waste at Vivekananda Polyclinic: A case study

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gupta, Saurabh; Boojh, Ram; Mishra, Ajai; Chandra, Hem

2009-01-01

Hospitals and other healthcare establishments have a 'duty of care' for the environment and for public health, and have particular responsibilities in relation to the waste they produce (i.e., biomedical waste). Negligence, in terms of biomedical waste management, significantly contributes to polluting the environment, affects the health of human beings, and depletes natural and financial resources. In India, in view of the serious situation of biomedical waste management, the Ministry of Environment and Forests, within the Government of India, ratified the Biomedical Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, in July 1998. The present paper provides a brief description of the biomedical waste (Management and Handling) Rules 1998, and the current biomedical waste management practices in one of the premier healthcare establishments of Lucknow, the Vivekananda Polyclinic. The objective in undertaking this study was to analyse the biomedical waste management system, including policy, practice (i.e., storage, collection, transportation and disposal), and compliance with the standards prescribed under the regulatory framework. The analysis consisted of interviews with medical authorities, doctors, and paramedical staff involved in the management of the biomedical wastes in the Polyclinic. Other important stakeholders that were consulted and interviewed included environmental engineers (looking after the Biomedical Waste Cell) of the State Pollution Control Board, and randomly selected patients and visitors to the Polyclinic. A general survey of the facilities of the Polyclinic was undertaken to ascertain the efficacy of the implemented measures. The waste was quantified based on random samples collected from each ward. It was found that, although the Polyclinic in general abides by the prescribed regulations for the treatment and disposal of biomedical waste, there is a need to further build the capacity of the Polyclinic and its staff in terms of providing state

Status of Research in Biomedical Engineering 1968.

Science.gov (United States)

National Inst. of General Medical Sciences (NIH), Bethesda, MD.

This status report is divided into eight sections. The first four represent the classical engineering or building aspects of bioengineering and deal with biomedical instrumentation, prosthetics, man-machine systems and computer and information systems. The next three sections are related to the scientific, intellectual and academic influence of…

Handbook of biomedical optics

CERN Document Server

Boas, David A

2011-01-01

Biomedical optics holds tremendous promise to deliver effective, safe, non- or minimally invasive diagnostics and targeted, customizable therapeutics. Handbook of Biomedical Optics provides an in-depth treatment of the field, including coverage of applications for biomedical research, diagnosis, and therapy. It introduces the theory and fundamentals of each subject, ensuring accessibility to a wide multidisciplinary readership. It also offers a view of the state of the art and discusses advantages and disadvantages of various techniques.Organized into six sections, this handbook: Contains intr

Complexity of EEG-signal in Time Domain - Possible Biomedical Application

Science.gov (United States)

Klonowski, Wlodzimierz; Olejarczyk, Elzbieta; Stepien, Robert

2002-07-01

Human brain is a highly complex nonlinear system. So it is not surprising that in analysis of EEG-signal, which represents overall activity of the brain, the methods of Nonlinear Dynamics (or Chaos Theory as it is commonly called) can be used. Even if the signal is not chaotic these methods are a motivating tool to explore changes in brain activity due to different functional activation states, e.g. different sleep stages, or to applied therapy, e.g. exposure to chemical agents (drugs) and physical factors (light, magnetic field). The methods supplied by Nonlinear Dynamics reveal signal characteristics that are not revealed by linear methods like FFT. Better understanding of principles that govern dynamics and complexity of EEG-signal can help to find `the signatures' of different physiological and pathological states of human brain, quantitative characteristics that may find applications in medical diagnostics.

Lessons Learned from Development of De-identification System for Biomedical Research in a Korean Tertiary Hospital.

Science.gov (United States)

Shin, Soo-Yong; Lyu, Yongman; Shin, Yongdon; Choi, Hyo Joung; Park, Jihyun; Kim, Woo-Sung; Lee, Jae Ho

2013-06-01

The Korean government has enacted two laws, namely, the Personal Information Protection Act and the Bioethics and Safety Act to prevent the unauthorized use of medical information. To protect patients' privacy by complying with governmental regulations and improve the convenience of research, Asan Medical Center has been developing a de-identification system for biomedical research. We reviewed Korean regulations to define the scope of the de-identification methods and well-known previous biomedical research platforms to extract the functionalities of the systems. Based on these review results, we implemented necessary programs based on the Asan Medical Center Information System framework which was built using the Microsoft. NET Framework and C#. The developed de-identification system comprises three main components: a de-identification tool, a search tool, and a chart review tool. The de-identification tool can substitute a randomly assigned research ID for a hospital patient ID, remove the identifiers in the structured format, and mask them in the unstructured format, i.e., texts. This tool achieved 98.14% precision and 97.39% recall for 6,520 clinical notes. The search tool can find the number of patients which satisfies given search criteria. The chart review tool can provide de-identified patient's clinical data for review purposes. We found that a clinical data warehouse was essential for successful implementation of the de-identification system, and this system should be tightly linked to an electronic Institutional Review Board system for easy operation of honest brokers. Additionally, we found that a secure cloud environment could be adopted to protect patients' privacy more thoroughly.

The Annals of Biomedical Engineering: inception to signature journal.

Science.gov (United States)

Fagette, Paul

2012-03-01

The Annals of Biomedical Engineering, the flagship journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society, developed through four distinct stages. Once an editorial infrastructure was in place and a publisher was secured, a long-lived struggle for sufficient manuscripts and financial stability ensued. The journal achieved a degree of stableness by the mid-1980s. Electronic communication and on-line publishing in the 1990s allowed more rapid turn around but the increased acceptance of quality manuscripts created pressures from insufficient available pages. The journal finally turned to self-publication. The Board of Directors and the Publications Board carefully nurtured the journal over the years with financial support and policy. Still, the bulk of the effort was carried by the editors. They dealt with an ever increasing complex publishing process that now supports three Society journals.

Text mining patents for biomedical knowledge.

Science.gov (United States)

Rodriguez-Esteban, Raul; Bundschus, Markus

2016-06-01

Biomedical text mining of scientific knowledge bases, such as Medline, has received much attention in recent years. Given that text mining is able to automatically extract biomedical facts that revolve around entities such as genes, proteins, and drugs, from unstructured text sources, it is seen as a major enabler to foster biomedical research and drug discovery. In contrast to the biomedical literature, research into the mining of biomedical patents has not reached the same level of maturity. Here, we review existing work and highlight the associated technical challenges that emerge from automatically extracting facts from patents. We conclude by outlining potential future directions in this domain that could help drive biomedical research and drug discovery. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Journal of Biomedical Investigation: Editorial Policies

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Journal of Biomedical Investigation: Editorial Policies. Journal Home ... The focus of the Journal of Biomedical Research is to promote interdisciplinary research across all Biomedical Sciences. It publishes ... Business editor – Sam Meludu.

Design of Biomedical Robots for Phenotype Prediction Problems.

Science.gov (United States)

deAndrés-Galiana, Enrique J; Fernández-Martínez, Juan Luis; Sonis, Stephen T

2016-08-01

Genomics has been used with varying degrees of success in the context of drug discovery and in defining mechanisms of action for diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative and rare diseases in the quest for orphan drugs. To improve its utility, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness optimization of analytical methods, especially those that translate to clinically relevant outcomes, is critical. Here we define a novel tool for genomic analysis termed a biomedical robot in order to improve phenotype prediction, identifying disease pathogenesis and significantly defining therapeutic targets. Biomedical robot analytics differ from historical methods in that they are based on melding feature selection methods and ensemble learning techniques. The biomedical robot mathematically exploits the structure of the uncertainty space of any classification problem conceived as an ill-posed optimization problem. Given a classifier, there exist different equivalent small-scale genetic signatures that provide similar predictive accuracies. We perform the sensitivity analysis to noise of the biomedical robot concept using synthetic microarrays perturbed by different kinds of noises in expression and class assignment. Finally, we show the application of this concept to the analysis of different diseases, inferring the pathways and the correlation networks. The final aim of a biomedical robot is to improve knowledge discovery and provide decision systems to optimize diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. This analysis shows that the biomedical robots are robust against different kinds of noises and particularly to a wrong class assignment of the samples. Assessing the uncertainty that is inherent to any phenotype prediction problem is the right way to address this kind of problem.

Functional Somatic Syndromes: Emerging Biomedical Models and Traditional Chinese Medicine

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Steven Tan

2004-01-01

Full Text Available The so-called functional somatic syndromes comprise a group of disorders that are primarily symptom-based, multisystemic in presentation and probably involve alterations in mind-brain-body interactions. The emerging neurobiological models of allostasis/allostatic load and of the emotional motor system show striking similarities with concepts used by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM to understand the functional somatic disorders and their underlying pathogenesis. These models incorporate a macroscopic perspective, accounting for the toll of acute and chronic traumas, physical and emotional stressors and the complex interactions between the mind, brain and body. The convergence of these biomedical models with the ancient paradigm of TCM may provide a new insight into scientifically verifiable diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for these common disorders.

Computational intelligence in biomedical imaging

CERN Document Server

2014-01-01

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art computational intelligence research and technologies in biomedical images with emphasis on biomedical decision making. Biomedical imaging offers useful information on patients’ medical conditions and clues to causes of their symptoms and diseases. Biomedical images, however, provide a large number of images which physicians must interpret. Therefore, computer aids are demanded and become indispensable in physicians’ decision making. This book discusses major technical advancements and research findings in the field of computational intelligence in biomedical imaging, for example, computational intelligence in computer-aided diagnosis for breast cancer, prostate cancer, and brain disease, in lung function analysis, and in radiation therapy. The book examines technologies and studies that have reached the practical level, and those technologies that are becoming available in clinical practices in hospitals rapidly such as computational inte...

Branding the bio/biomedical engineering degree.

Science.gov (United States)

Voigt, Herbert F

2011-01-01

The future challenges to medical and biological engineering, sometimes referred to as biomedical engineering or simply bioengineering, are many. Some of these are identifiable now and others will emerge from time to time as new technologies are introduced and harnessed. There is a fundamental issue regarding "Branding the bio/biomedical engineering degree" that requires a common understanding of what is meant by a B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering, Bioengineering, or Biological Engineering. In this paper we address some of the issues involved in branding the Bio/Biomedical Engineering degree, with the aim of clarifying the Bio/Biomedical Engineering brand.

Modeling Complex Systems

CERN Document Server

Boccara, Nino

2010-01-01

Modeling Complex Systems, 2nd Edition, explores the process of modeling complex systems, providing examples from such diverse fields as ecology, epidemiology, sociology, seismology, and economics. It illustrates how models of complex systems are built and provides indispensable mathematical tools for studying their dynamics. This vital introductory text is useful for advanced undergraduate students in various scientific disciplines, and serves as an important reference book for graduate students and young researchers. This enhanced second edition includes: . -recent research results and bibliographic references -extra footnotes which provide biographical information on cited scientists who have made significant contributions to the field -new and improved worked-out examples to aid a student’s comprehension of the content -exercises to challenge the reader and complement the material Nino Boccara is also the author of Essentials of Mathematica: With Applications to Mathematics and Physics (Springer, 2007).

Biomedical nanotechnology.

Science.gov (United States)

Hurst, Sarah J

2011-01-01

This chapter summarizes the roles of nanomaterials in biomedical applications, focusing on those highlighted in this volume. A brief history of nanoscience and technology and a general introduction to the field are presented. Then, the chemical and physical properties of nanostructures that make them ideal for use in biomedical applications are highlighted. Examples of common applications, including sensing, imaging, and therapeutics, are given. Finally, the challenges associated with translating this field from the research laboratory to the clinic setting, in terms of the larger societal implications, are discussed.

COEUS: "semantic web in a box" for biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Lopes, Pedro; Oliveira, José Luís

2012-12-17

As the "omics" revolution unfolds, the growth in data quantity and diversity is bringing about the need for pioneering bioinformatics software, capable of significantly improving the research workflow. To cope with these computer science demands, biomedical software engineers are adopting emerging semantic web technologies that better suit the life sciences domain. The latter's complex relationships are easily mapped into semantic web graphs, enabling a superior understanding of collected knowledge. Despite increased awareness of semantic web technologies in bioinformatics, their use is still limited. COEUS is a new semantic web framework, aiming at a streamlined application development cycle and following a "semantic web in a box" approach. The framework provides a single package including advanced data integration and triplification tools, base ontologies, a web-oriented engine and a flexible exploration API. Resources can be integrated from heterogeneous sources, including CSV and XML files or SQL and SPARQL query results, and mapped directly to one or more ontologies. Advanced interoperability features include REST services, a SPARQL endpoint and LinkedData publication. These enable the creation of multiple applications for web, desktop or mobile environments, and empower a new knowledge federation layer. The platform, targeted at biomedical application developers, provides a complete skeleton ready for rapid application deployment, enhancing the creation of new semantic information systems. COEUS is available as open source at http://bioinformatics.ua.pt/coeus/.

Improving the extraction of complex regulatory events from scientific text by using ontology-based inference.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Jung-Jae; Rebholz-Schuhmann, Dietrich

2011-10-06

The extraction of complex events from biomedical text is a challenging task and requires in-depth semantic analysis. Previous approaches associate lexical and syntactic resources with ontologies for the semantic analysis, but fall short in testing the benefits from the use of domain knowledge. We developed a system that deduces implicit events from explicitly expressed events by using inference rules that encode domain knowledge. We evaluated the system with the inference module on three tasks: First, when tested against a corpus with manually annotated events, the inference module of our system contributes 53.2% of correct extractions, but does not cause any incorrect results. Second, the system overall reproduces 33.1% of the transcription regulatory events contained in RegulonDB (up to 85.0% precision) and the inference module is required for 93.8% of the reproduced events. Third, we applied the system with minimum adaptations to the identification of cell activity regulation events, confirming that the inference improves the performance of the system also on this task. Our research shows that the inference based on domain knowledge plays a significant role in extracting complex events from text. This approach has great potential in recognizing the complex concepts of such biomedical ontologies as Gene Ontology in the literature.

Improving the extraction of complex regulatory events from scientific text by using ontology-based inference

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kim Jung-jae

2011-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The extraction of complex events from biomedical text is a challenging task and requires in-depth semantic analysis. Previous approaches associate lexical and syntactic resources with ontologies for the semantic analysis, but fall short in testing the benefits from the use of domain knowledge. Results We developed a system that deduces implicit events from explicitly expressed events by using inference rules that encode domain knowledge. We evaluated the system with the inference module on three tasks: First, when tested against a corpus with manually annotated events, the inference module of our system contributes 53.2% of correct extractions, but does not cause any incorrect results. Second, the system overall reproduces 33.1% of the transcription regulatory events contained in RegulonDB (up to 85.0% precision and the inference module is required for 93.8% of the reproduced events. Third, we applied the system with minimum adaptations to the identification of cell activity regulation events, confirming that the inference improves the performance of the system also on this task. Conclusions Our research shows that the inference based on domain knowledge plays a significant role in extracting complex events from text. This approach has great potential in recognizing the complex concepts of such biomedical ontologies as Gene Ontology in the literature.

Facilities available for biomedical science research in the public universities in Lagos, Nigeria.

Science.gov (United States)

John, T A

2010-03-01

Across the world, basic medical scientists and physician scientists work on common platforms in state-of-the-arts laboratories doing translational research that occasionally results in bedside application. Biotechnology industries capitalise on useful findings for colossal profit.1 In Nigeria and the rest of Africa, biomedical science has not thrived and the contribution of publications to global high impact journals is low.2 This work investigated facilities available for modern biomedical research in Lagos public universities to extract culprit factors. The two public universities in Lagos, Nigeria were investigated by a cross sectional questionnaire survey of the technical staff manning biomedical science departments. They were asked about availability of 47 modern biomedical science research laboratory components such as cold room and microscopes and six research administration components such as director of research and grants administration. For convenient basic laboratory components such as autoclaves and balances, 50% responses indicated "well maintained and always functional" whereas for less convenient complex, high maintenance, state-of-the-arts equipment 19% responses indicated "well maintained and always functional." Respondents indicated that components of modern biomedical science research administration were 44% of expectation. The survey reveal a deficit in state-of the-arts research equipment and also a deficit in high maintenance, expensive equipment indicating that biomedical science in the investigated environment lacks the momentum of global trends and also lacks buoyant funding. In addition, administration supporting biomedical science is below expectation and may also account for the low contributions of research articles to global high impact journals.

Biomedical applications of polymers

CERN Document Server

Gebelein, C G

1991-01-01

The biomedical applications of polymers span an extremely wide spectrum of uses, including artificial organs, skin and soft tissue replacements, orthopaedic applications, dental applications, and controlled release of medications. No single, short review can possibly cover all these items in detail, and dozens of books andhundreds of reviews exist on biomedical polymers. Only a few relatively recent examples will be cited here;additional reviews are listed under most of the major topics in this book. We will consider each of the majorclassifications of biomedical polymers to some extent, inclu

Biomedical Engineering Desk Reference

CERN Document Server

Ratner, Buddy D; Schoen, Frederick J; Lemons, Jack E; Dyro, Joseph; Martinsen, Orjan G; Kyle, Richard; Preim, Bernhard; Bartz, Dirk; Grimnes, Sverre; Vallero, Daniel; Semmlow, John; Murray, W Bosseau; Perez, Reinaldo; Bankman, Isaac; Dunn, Stanley; Ikada, Yoshito; Moghe, Prabhas V; Constantinides, Alkis

2009-01-01

A one-stop Desk Reference, for Biomedical Engineers involved in the ever expanding and very fast moving area; this is a book that will not gather dust on the shelf. It brings together the essential professional reference content from leading international contributors in the biomedical engineering field. Material covers a broad range of topics including: Biomechanics and Biomaterials; Tissue Engineering; and Biosignal Processing* A hard-working desk reference providing all the essential material needed by biomedical and clinical engineers on a day-to-day basis * Fundamentals, key techniques,

Portable blood extraction device integrated with biomedical monitoring system

Science.gov (United States)

Khumpuang, S.; Horade, M.; Fujioka, K.; Sugiyama, S.

2006-01-01

Painless and portable blood extraction device has been immersed in the world of miniaturization on bio-medical research particularly in manufacturing point-of-care systems. The fabrication of a blood extraction device integrated with an electrolyte-monitoring system is reported in this paper. The device has advantages in precise controlled dosage of blood extracted including the slightly damaged blood vessels and nervous system. The in-house blood diagnostic will become simple for the patients. Main components of the portable system are; the blood extraction device and electrolyte-monitoring system. The monitoring system consists of ISFET (Ion Selective Field Effect Transistor) for measuring the concentration level of minerals in blood. In this work, we measured the level of 3 ions; Na+, K+ and Cl-. The mentioned ions are frequently required the measurement since their concentration levels in the blood can indicate whether the kidney, pancreas, liver or heart is being malfunction. The fabrication of the whole system and experimentation on each ISM (Ion Sensitive Membrane) will be provided. Taking the advantages of LIGA technology, the 100 hollow microneedles fabricated by Synchrotron Radiation deep X-ray lithography through PCT (Plane-pattern to Cross-section Transfer) technique have been consisted in 5x5 mm2 area. The microneedle is 300 μm in base-diameter, 500 μm-pitch, 800 μm-height and 50 μm hole-diameter. The total size of the blood extraction device is 2x2x2 cm 3. The package is made from a plastic socket including slots for inserting microneedle array and ISFET connecting to an electrical circuit for the monitoring. Through the dimensional design for simply handling and selection of disposable material, the patients can self-evaluate the critical level of the body minerals in anywhere and anytime.

Extending Life Concepts to Complex Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jean Le Fur

2013-01-01

Full Text Available There is still no consensus definition of complex systems. This article explores, as a heuristic approach, the possibility of using notions associated with life as transversal concepts for defining complex systems. This approach is developed within a general classification of systems, with complex systems considered as a general ‘living things’ category and living organisms as a specialised class within this category. Concepts associated with life are first explored in the context of complex systems: birth, death and lifetime, adaptation, ontogeny and growth, reproduction. Thereafter, a refutation approach is used to test the proposed classification against a set of diverse systems, including a reference case, edge cases and immaterial complex systems. The summary of this analysis is then used to generate a definition of complex systems, based on the proposal, and within the background of cybernetics, complex adaptive systems and biology. Using notions such as ‘birth’ or ‘lifespan’ as transversal concepts may be of heuristic value for the generic characterization of complex systems, opening up new lines of research for improving their definition.

Biomedical research applications

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Anon.

1982-01-01

The biomedical research Panel believes that the Calutron facility at Oak Ridge is a national and international resource of immense scientific value and of fundamental importance to continued biomedical research. This resource is essential to the development of new isotope uses in biology and medicine. It should therefore be nurtured by adequate support and operated in a way that optimizes its services to the scientific and technological community. The Panel sees a continuing need for a reliable supply of a wide variety of enriched stable isotopes. The past and present utilization of stable isotopes in biomedical research is documented in Appendix 7. Future requirements for stable isotopes are impossible to document, however, because of the unpredictability of research itself. Nonetheless we expect the demand for isotopes to increase in parallel with the continuing expansion of biomedical research as a whole. There are a number of promising research projects at the present time, and these are expected to lead to an increase in production requirements. The Panel also believes that a high degree of priority should be given to replacing the supplies of the 65 isotopes (out of the 224 previously available enriched isotopes) no longer available from ORNL

SOA-based digital library services and composition in biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Xia; Liu, Enjie; Clapworthy, Gordon J; Viceconti, Marco; Testi, Debora

2012-06-01

Carefully collected, high-quality data are crucial in biomedical visualization, and it is important that the user community has ready access to both this data and the high-performance computing resources needed by the complex, computational algorithms that will process it. Biological researchers generally require data, tools and algorithms from multiple providers to achieve their goals. This paper illustrates our response to the problems that result from this. The Living Human Digital Library (LHDL) project presented in this paper has taken advantage of Web Services to build a biomedical digital library infrastructure that allows clinicians and researchers not only to preserve, trace and share data resources, but also to collaborate at the data-processing level. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Mixed Methods in Biomedical and Health Services Research

OpenAIRE

Curry, Leslie A.; Krumholz, Harlan M.; O’Cathain, Alicia; Plano Clark, Vicki L.; Cherlin, Emily; Bradley, Elizabeth H.

2013-01-01

Mixed methods studies, in which qualitative and quantitative methods are combined in a single program of inquiry, can be valuable in biomedical and health services research, where the complementary strengths of each approach can yield greater insight into complex phenomena than either approach alone. Although interest in mixed methods is growing among science funders and investigators, written guidance on how to conduct and assess rigorous mixed methods studies is not readily accessible to th...

Pathophysiologic mechanisms of biomedical nanomaterials

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wang, Liming; Chen, Chunying

2016-01-01

Nanomaterials (NMs) have been widespread used in biomedical fields, daily consuming, and even food industry. It is crucial to understand the safety and biomedical efficacy of NMs. In this review, we summarized the recent progress about the physiological and pathological effects of NMs from several levels: protein-nano interface, NM-subcellular structures, and cell–cell interaction. We focused on the detailed information of nano-bio interaction, especially about protein adsorption, intracellular trafficking, biological barriers, and signaling pathways as well as the associated mechanism mediated by nanomaterials. We also introduced related analytical methods that are meaningful and helpful for biomedical effect studies in the future. We believe that knowledge about pathophysiologic effects of NMs is not only significant for rational design of medical NMs but also helps predict their safety and further improve their applications in the future. - Highlights: • Rapid protein adsorption onto nanomaterials that affects biomedical effects • Nanomaterials and their interaction with biological membrane, intracellular trafficking and specific cellular effects • Nanomaterials and their interaction with biological barriers • The signaling pathways mediated by nanomaterials and related biomedical effects • Novel techniques for studying translocation and biomedical effects of NMs

Pathophysiologic mechanisms of biomedical nanomaterials

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Wang, Liming, E-mail: wangliming@ihep.ac.cn; Chen, Chunying, E-mail: chenchy@nanoctr.cn

2016-05-15

Nanomaterials (NMs) have been widespread used in biomedical fields, daily consuming, and even food industry. It is crucial to understand the safety and biomedical efficacy of NMs. In this review, we summarized the recent progress about the physiological and pathological effects of NMs from several levels: protein-nano interface, NM-subcellular structures, and cell–cell interaction. We focused on the detailed information of nano-bio interaction, especially about protein adsorption, intracellular trafficking, biological barriers, and signaling pathways as well as the associated mechanism mediated by nanomaterials. We also introduced related analytical methods that are meaningful and helpful for biomedical effect studies in the future. We believe that knowledge about pathophysiologic effects of NMs is not only significant for rational design of medical NMs but also helps predict their safety and further improve their applications in the future. - Highlights: • Rapid protein adsorption onto nanomaterials that affects biomedical effects • Nanomaterials and their interaction with biological membrane, intracellular trafficking and specific cellular effects • Nanomaterials and their interaction with biological barriers • The signaling pathways mediated by nanomaterials and related biomedical effects • Novel techniques for studying translocation and biomedical effects of NMs.

Advances in polymeric systems for tissue engineering and biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Ravichandran, Rajeswari; Sundarrajan, Subramanian; Venugopal, Jayarama Reddy; Mukherjee, Shayanti; Ramakrishna, Seeram

2012-03-01

The characteristics of tissue engineered scaffolds are major concerns in the quest to fabricate ideal scaffolds for tissue engineering applications. The polymer scaffolds employed for tissue engineering applications should possess multifunctional properties such as biocompatibility, biodegradability and favorable mechanical properties as it comes in direct contact with the body fluids in vivo. Additionally, the polymer system should also possess biomimetic architecture and should support stem cell adhesion, proliferation and differentiation. As the progress in polymer technology continues, polymeric biomaterials have taken characteristics more closely related to that desired for tissue engineering and clinical needs. Stimuli responsive polymers also termed as smart biomaterials respond to stimuli such as pH, temperature, enzyme, antigen, glucose and electrical stimuli that are inherently present in living systems. This review highlights the exciting advancements in these polymeric systems that relate to biological and tissue engineering applications. Additionally, several aspects of technology namely scaffold fabrication methods and surface modifications to confer biological functionality to the polymers have also been discussed. The ultimate objective is to emphasize on these underutilized adaptive behaviors of the polymers so that novel applications and new generations of smart polymeric materials can be realized for biomedical and tissue engineering applications. Copyright © 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Biomedical signal analysis

CERN Document Server

Rangayyan, Rangaraj M

2015-01-01

The book will help assist a reader in the development of techniques for analysis of biomedical signals and computer aided diagnoses with a pedagogical examination of basic and advanced topics accompanied by over 350 figures and illustrations. Wide range of filtering techniques presented to address various applications. 800 mathematical expressions and equations. Practical questions, problems and laboratory exercises. Includes fractals and chaos theory with biomedical applications.

Biomedical informatics and translational medicine

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sarkar Indra

2010-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract Biomedical informatics involves a core set of methodologies that can provide a foundation for crossing the "translational barriers" associated with translational medicine. To this end, the fundamental aspects of biomedical informatics (e.g., bioinformatics, imaging informatics, clinical informatics, and public health informatics may be essential in helping improve the ability to bring basic research findings to the bedside, evaluate the efficacy of interventions across communities, and enable the assessment of the eventual impact of translational medicine innovations on health policies. Here, a brief description is provided for a selection of key biomedical informatics topics (Decision Support, Natural Language Processing, Standards, Information Retrieval, and Electronic Health Records and their relevance to translational medicine. Based on contributions and advancements in each of these topic areas, the article proposes that biomedical informatics practitioners ("biomedical informaticians" can be essential members of translational medicine teams.

Engineering of PDMS surfaces for use in microsystems for capture and isolation of complex and biomedically important proteins: epidermal growth factor receptor as a model system.

Science.gov (United States)

Lowe, Aaron M; Ozer, Byram H; Wiepz, Gregory J; Bertics, Paul J; Abbott, Nicholas L

2008-08-01

Elastomers based on poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) are promising materials for fabrication of a wide range of microanalytical systems due to their mechanical and optical properties and ease of processing. To date, however, quantitative studies that demonstrate reliable and reproducible methods for attachment of binding groups that capture complex receptor proteins of relevance to biomedical applications of PDMS microsystems have not been reported. Herein we describe methods that lead to the reproducible capture of a transmembrane protein, the human epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor, onto PDMS surfaces presenting covalently immobilized antibodies for EGF receptor, and subsequent isolation of the captured receptor by mechanical transfer of the receptor onto a chemically functionalized surface of a gold film for detection. This result is particularly significant because the physical properties of transmembrane proteins make this class of proteins a difficult one to analyze. We benchmark the performance of antibodies to the human EGF receptor covalently immobilized on PDMS against the performance of the same antibodies physisorbed to conventional surfaces utilized in ELISA assays through the use of EGF receptor that was (32)P-radiolabeled in its autophosphorylation domain. These results reveal that two pan-reactive antibodies for the EGF receptor (clones H11 and 111.6) and one phosphospecific EGF receptor antibody (clone pY1068) capture the receptor on both PDMS and ELISA plates. When using H11 antibody to capture EGF receptor and subsequent treatment with a stripping buffer (NaOH and sodium dodecylsulfate) to isolate the receptor, the signal-to-background obtained using the PDMS surface was 82 : 1, exceeding the signal-to-background measured on the ELISA plate (<48 : 1). We also characterized the isolation of captured EGF receptor by mechanical contact of the PDMS surface with a chemically functionalized gold film. The efficiency of mechanical transfer of the

Comparatively Studied Color Correction Methods for Color Calibration of Automated Microscopy Complex of Biomedical Specimens

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

T. A. Kravtsova

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The paper considers a task of generating the requirements and creating a calibration target for automated microscopy systems (AMS of biomedical specimens to provide the invariance of algorithms and software to the hardware configuration. The required number of color fields of the calibration target and their color coordinates are mostly determined by the color correction method, for which coefficients of the equations are estimated during the calibration process. The paper analyses existing color calibration techniques for digital imaging systems using an optical microscope and shows that there is a lack of published results of comparative studies to demonstrate a particular useful color correction method for microscopic images. A comparative study of ten image color correction methods in RGB space using polynomials and combinations of color coordinate of different orders was carried out. The method of conditioned least squares to estimate the coefficients in the color correction equations using captured images of 217 color fields of the calibration target Kodak Q60-E3 was applied. The regularization parameter in this method was chosen experimentally. It was demonstrated that the best color correction quality characteristics are provided by the method that uses a combination of color coordinates of the 3rd order. The study of the influence of the number and the set of color fields included in calibration target on color correction quality for microscopic images was performed. Six train sets containing 30, 35, 40, 50, 60 and 80 color fields, and test set of 47 color fields not included in any of the train sets were formed. It was found out that the train set of 60 color fields minimizes the color correction error values for both operating modes of digital camera: using "default" color settings and with automatic white balance. At the same time it was established that the use of color fields from the widely used now Kodak Q60-E3 target does not

Use of systematic review to inform the infection risk for biomedical engineers and technicians servicing biomedical devices

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Smith, Anne-Louise

2011-01-01

Full text: Many microorganisms responsible for hospital acquired infections are able to stay viable on surfaces with no visible sign of contamination, in dry conditions and on non-porous surfaces. The infection risk to biomedical staff when servicing biomedical devices is not documented. An indirect approach has been used to examine the different aspects that will affect the risk of infection including a systematic review of microbial contamination and transmission relating to biomedical devices. A systematic review found 58% of biomedical devices have microbial contamination with 13% having at least one pathogenic organism. These microbes can persist for some months. Occupational-infections of biomedical service staff are low compared to other healthcare workers. A biomedical device with contaminated surface or dust was identified as the source of patient outbreaks in 13 papers. The cleaning agent most tested for removal of micro-organisms from devices was alcohol swabs, but sterile water swabs were also effective. However, manufacturers mainly recommend (74%) cleaning devices with water and detergent. Biomedical engineers and technicians have a small risk of being exposed to dangerous micro-organisms on most biomedical devices, but without skin breakage, this exposure is unlikely to cause ill-health. It is recommended that biomedical staff follow good infection control practices, wipe devices with detergent, sterile water or alcohol swabs as recommended by the manufacturer before working on them, and keep alcohol hand rubs accessible at all benches. (author)

Research in intelligent biomedical clothing vs. realities in the European textile business.

Science.gov (United States)

Walter, Lutz

2004-01-01

In order to make intelligent biomedical clothing a market reality, a critical mass of scientific, technical and industrial capacities from various disciplines and industries must be successfully brought together. The textiles and clothing sector, i.e. the industry that transform natural or man-made fibres into yarns then with a myriad of processing options into complex tissues and finally into clothing, is undoubtedly a crucial element in such development. With Europe disposing of the world's most diverse, productive and innovative textiles and clothing industry, in addition to relevant expertise and resources in other scientific disciplines and industrial sectors, it could play a leading role in the advancement of the concept of intelligent biomedical clothing. In this process, a great number of challenges--firstly scientific and technical in nature--still need to be overcome and support from public funding programmes could constitute the necessary trigger for research and industrial efforts to be seriously undertaken. In view of the great benefits of such new products for the individual consumer, national health care systems and the society as a whole, a concerted effort in private-public partnership seems merited.

Enhancing biomedical text summarization using semantic relation extraction.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yue Shang

Full Text Available Automatic text summarization for a biomedical concept can help researchers to get the key points of a certain topic from large amount of biomedical literature efficiently. In this paper, we present a method for generating text summary for a given biomedical concept, e.g., H1N1 disease, from multiple documents based on semantic relation extraction. Our approach includes three stages: 1 We extract semantic relations in each sentence using the semantic knowledge representation tool SemRep. 2 We develop a relation-level retrieval method to select the relations most relevant to each query concept and visualize them in a graphic representation. 3 For relations in the relevant set, we extract informative sentences that can interpret them from the document collection to generate text summary using an information retrieval based method. Our major focus in this work is to investigate the contribution of semantic relation extraction to the task of biomedical text summarization. The experimental results on summarization for a set of diseases show that the introduction of semantic knowledge improves the performance and our results are better than the MEAD system, a well-known tool for text summarization.

Enhancing biomedical text summarization using semantic relation extraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Shang, Yue; Li, Yanpeng; Lin, Hongfei; Yang, Zhihao

2011-01-01

Automatic text summarization for a biomedical concept can help researchers to get the key points of a certain topic from large amount of biomedical literature efficiently. In this paper, we present a method for generating text summary for a given biomedical concept, e.g., H1N1 disease, from multiple documents based on semantic relation extraction. Our approach includes three stages: 1) We extract semantic relations in each sentence using the semantic knowledge representation tool SemRep. 2) We develop a relation-level retrieval method to select the relations most relevant to each query concept and visualize them in a graphic representation. 3) For relations in the relevant set, we extract informative sentences that can interpret them from the document collection to generate text summary using an information retrieval based method. Our major focus in this work is to investigate the contribution of semantic relation extraction to the task of biomedical text summarization. The experimental results on summarization for a set of diseases show that the introduction of semantic knowledge improves the performance and our results are better than the MEAD system, a well-known tool for text summarization.

Complex Systems: An Introduction

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

Home; Journals; Resonance – Journal of Science Education; Volume 14; Issue 9. Complex Systems: An Introduction - Anthropic Principle, Terrestrial Complexity, Complex Materials. V K Wadhawan. General Article Volume 14 Issue 9 September 2009 pp 894-906 ...

Complex Systems and Dependability

CERN Document Server

Zamojski, Wojciech; Sugier, Jaroslaw

2012-01-01

Typical contemporary complex system is a multifaceted amalgamation of technical, information, organization, software and human (users, administrators and management) resources. Complexity of such a system comes not only from its involved technical and organizational structure but mainly from complexity of information processes that must be implemented in the operational environment (data processing, monitoring, management, etc.). In such case traditional methods of reliability analysis focused mainly on technical level are usually insufficient in performance evaluation and more innovative meth

Terahertz Imaging for Biomedical Applications Pattern Recognition and Tomographic Reconstruction

CERN Document Server

Yin, Xiaoxia; Abbott, Derek

2012-01-01

Terahertz Imaging for Biomedical Applications: Pattern Recognition and Tomographic Reconstruction presents the necessary algorithms needed to assist screening, diagnosis, and treatment, and these algorithms will play a critical role in the accurate detection of abnormalities present in biomedical imaging. Terahertz biomedical imaging has become an area of interest due to its ability to simultaneously acquire both image and spectral information. Terahertz imaging systems are being commercialized with an increasing number of trials performed in a biomedical setting. Terahertz tomographic imaging and detection technology contributes to the ability to identify opaque objects with clear boundaries,and would be useful to both in vivo and ex vivo environments. This book also: Introduces terahertz radiation techniques and provides a number of topical examples of signal and image processing, as well as machine learning Presents the most recent developments in an emerging field, terahertz radiation Utilizes new methods...

Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

CERN Document Server

Meyers, Robert A

2009-01-01

Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science provides an authoritative single source for understanding and applying the concepts of complexity theory together with the tools and measures for analyzing complex systems in all fields of science and engineering. The science and tools of complexity and systems science include theories of self-organization, complex systems, synergetics, dynamical systems, turbulence, catastrophes, instabilities, nonlinearity, stochastic processes, chaos, neural networks, cellular automata, adaptive systems, and genetic algorithms. Examples of near-term problems and major unknowns that can be approached through complexity and systems science include: The structure, history and future of the universe; the biological basis of consciousness; the integration of genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics as systems biology; human longevity limits; the limits of computing; sustainability of life on earth; predictability, dynamics and extent of earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and other n...

Collaborative mining and interpretation of large-scale data for biomedical research insights.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Georgia Tsiliki

Full Text Available Biomedical research becomes increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature. Researchers need to efficiently and effectively collaborate and make decisions by meaningfully assembling, mining and analyzing available large-scale volumes of complex multi-faceted data residing in different sources. In line with related research directives revealing that, in spite of the recent advances in data mining and computational analysis, humans can easily detect patterns which computer algorithms may have difficulty in finding, this paper reports on the practical use of an innovative web-based collaboration support platform in a biomedical research context. Arguing that dealing with data-intensive and cognitively complex settings is not a technical problem alone, the proposed platform adopts a hybrid approach that builds on the synergy between machine and human intelligence to facilitate the underlying sense-making and decision making processes. User experience shows that the platform enables more informed and quicker decisions, by displaying the aggregated information according to their needs, while also exploiting the associated human intelligence.

NCBO Ontology Recommender 2.0: an enhanced approach for biomedical ontology recommendation.

Science.gov (United States)

Martínez-Romero, Marcos; Jonquet, Clement; O'Connor, Martin J; Graybeal, John; Pazos, Alejandro; Musen, Mark A

2017-06-07

Ontologies and controlled terminologies have become increasingly important in biomedical research. Researchers use ontologies to annotate their data with ontology terms, enabling better data integration and interoperability across disparate datasets. However, the number, variety and complexity of current biomedical ontologies make it cumbersome for researchers to determine which ones to reuse for their specific needs. To overcome this problem, in 2010 the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) released the Ontology Recommender, which is a service that receives a biomedical text corpus or a list of keywords and suggests ontologies appropriate for referencing the indicated terms. We developed a new version of the NCBO Ontology Recommender. Called Ontology Recommender 2.0, it uses a novel recommendation approach that evaluates the relevance of an ontology to biomedical text data according to four different criteria: (1) the extent to which the ontology covers the input data; (2) the acceptance of the ontology in the biomedical community; (3) the level of detail of the ontology classes that cover the input data; and (4) the specialization of the ontology to the domain of the input data. Our evaluation shows that the enhanced recommender provides higher quality suggestions than the original approach, providing better coverage of the input data, more detailed information about their concepts, increased specialization for the domain of the input data, and greater acceptance and use in the community. In addition, it provides users with more explanatory information, along with suggestions of not only individual ontologies but also groups of ontologies to use together. It also can be customized to fit the needs of different ontology recommendation scenarios. Ontology Recommender 2.0 suggests relevant ontologies for annotating biomedical text data. It combines the strengths of its predecessor with a range of adjustments and new features that improve its reliability

Adaptive generalized combination complex synchronization of uncertain real and complex nonlinear systems

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Wang, Shi-bing, E-mail: wang-shibing@dlut.edu.cn, E-mail: wangxy@dlut.edu.cn [School of Computer and Information Engineering, Fuyang Normal University, Fuyang 236041 (China); Faculty of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024 (China); Wang, Xing-yuan, E-mail: wang-shibing@dlut.edu.cn, E-mail: wangxy@dlut.edu.cn [Faculty of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024 (China); Wang, Xiu-you [School of Computer and Information Engineering, Fuyang Normal University, Fuyang 236041 (China); Zhou, Yu-fei [College of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Anhui University, Hefei 230601 (China)

2016-04-15

With comprehensive consideration of generalized synchronization, combination synchronization and adaptive control, this paper investigates a novel adaptive generalized combination complex synchronization (AGCCS) scheme for different real and complex nonlinear systems with unknown parameters. On the basis of Lyapunov stability theory and adaptive control, an AGCCS controller and parameter update laws are derived to achieve synchronization and parameter identification of two real drive systems and a complex response system, as well as two complex drive systems and a real response system. Two simulation examples, namely, ACGCS for chaotic real Lorenz and Chen systems driving a hyperchaotic complex Lü system, and hyperchaotic complex Lorenz and Chen systems driving a real chaotic Lü system, are presented to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Management of complex dynamical systems

Science.gov (United States)

MacKay, R. S.

2018-02-01

Complex dynamical systems are systems with many interdependent components which evolve in time. One might wish to control their trajectories, but a more practical alternative is to control just their statistical behaviour. In many contexts this would be both sufficient and a more realistic goal, e.g. climate and socio-economic systems. I refer to it as ‘management’ of complex dynamical systems. In this paper, some mathematics for management of complex dynamical systems is developed in the weakly dependent regime, and questions are posed for the strongly dependent regime.

The ethics of biomedical big data

CERN Document Server

Mittelstadt, Brent Daniel

2016-01-01

This book presents cutting edge research on the new ethical challenges posed by biomedical Big Data technologies and practices. ‘Biomedical Big Data’ refers to the analysis of aggregated, very large datasets to improve medical knowledge and clinical care. The book describes the ethical problems posed by aggregation of biomedical datasets and re-use/re-purposing of data, in areas such as privacy, consent, professionalism, power relationships, and ethical governance of Big Data platforms. Approaches and methods are discussed that can be used to address these problems to achieve the appropriate balance between the social goods of biomedical Big Data research and the safety and privacy of individuals. Seventeen original contributions analyse the ethical, social and related policy implications of the analysis and curation of biomedical Big Data, written by leading experts in the areas of biomedical research, medical and technology ethics, privacy, governance and data protection. The book advances our understan...

Mutual-Information-Based Incremental Relaying Communications for Wireless Biomedical Implant Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yangzhe Liao

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Network lifetime maximization of wireless biomedical implant systems is one of the major research challenges of wireless body area networks (WBANs. In this paper, a mutual information (MI-based incremental relaying communication protocol is presented where several on-body relay nodes and one coordinator are attached to the clothes of a patient. Firstly, a comprehensive analysis of a system model is investigated in terms of channel path loss, energy consumption, and the outage probability from the network perspective. Secondly, only when the MI value becomes smaller than the predetermined threshold is data transmission allowed. The communication path selection can be either from the implanted sensor to the on-body relay then forwards to the coordinator or from the implanted sensor to the coordinator directly, depending on the communication distance. Moreover, mathematical models of quality of service (QoS metrics are derived along with the related subjective functions. The results show that the MI-based incremental relaying technique achieves better performance in comparison to our previous proposed protocol techniques regarding several selected performance metrics. The outcome of this paper can be applied to intra-body continuous physiological signal monitoring, artificial biofeedback-oriented WBANs, and telemedicine system design.

Building a biomedical ontology recommender web service

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jonquet Clement

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Researchers in biomedical informatics use ontologies and terminologies to annotate their data in order to facilitate data integration and translational discoveries. As the use of ontologies for annotation of biomedical datasets has risen, a common challenge is to identify ontologies that are best suited to annotating specific datasets. The number and variety of biomedical ontologies is large, and it is cumbersome for a researcher to figure out which ontology to use. Methods We present the Biomedical Ontology Recommender web service. The system uses textual metadata or a set of keywords describing a domain of interest and suggests appropriate ontologies for annotating or representing the data. The service makes a decision based on three criteria. The first one is coverage, or the ontologies that provide most terms covering the input text. The second is connectivity, or the ontologies that are most often mapped to by other ontologies. The final criterion is size, or the number of concepts in the ontologies. The service scores the ontologies as a function of scores of the annotations created using the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO Annotator web service. We used all the ontologies from the UMLS Metathesaurus and the NCBO BioPortal. Results We compare and contrast our Recommender by an exhaustive functional comparison to previously published efforts. We evaluate and discuss the results of several recommendation heuristics in the context of three real world use cases. The best recommendations heuristics, rated ‘very relevant’ by expert evaluators, are the ones based on coverage and connectivity criteria. The Recommender service (alpha version is available to the community and is embedded into BioPortal.

Control of complex systems

CERN Document Server

Albertos, Pedro; Blanke, Mogens; Isidori, Alberto; Schaufelberger, Walter; Sanz, Ricardo

2001-01-01

The world of artificial systems is reaching complexity levels that es­ cape human understanding. Surface traffic, electricity distribution, air­ planes, mobile communications, etc. , are examples that demonstrate that we are running into problems that are beyond classical scientific or engi­ neering knowledge. There is an ongoing world-wide effort to understand these systems and develop models that can capture its behavior. The reason for this work is clear, if our lack of understanding deepens, we will lose our capability to control these systems and make they behave as we want. Researchers from many different fields are trying to understand and develop theories for complex man-made systems. This book presents re­ search from the perspective of control and systems theory. The book has grown out of activities in the research program Control of Complex Systems (COSY). The program has been sponsored by the Eu­ ropean Science Foundation (ESF) which for 25 years has been one of the leading players in stimula...

Synchronization in node of complex networks consist of complex chaotic system

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Wei, Qiang, E-mail: qiangweibeihua@163.com [Beihua University computer and technology College, BeiHua University, Jilin, 132021, Jilin (China); Digital Images Processing Institute of Beihua University, BeiHua University, Jilin, 132011, Jilin (China); Faculty of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024 (China); Xie, Cheng-jun [Beihua University computer and technology College, BeiHua University, Jilin, 132021, Jilin (China); Digital Images Processing Institute of Beihua University, BeiHua University, Jilin, 132011, Jilin (China); Liu, Hong-jun [School of Information Engineering, Weifang Vocational College, Weifang, 261041 (China); Li, Yan-hui [The Library, Weifang Vocational College, Weifang, 261041 (China)

2014-07-15

A new synchronization method is investigated for node of complex networks consists of complex chaotic system. When complex networks realize synchronization, different component of complex state variable synchronize up to different scaling complex function by a designed complex feedback controller. This paper change synchronization scaling function from real field to complex field for synchronization in node of complex networks with complex chaotic system. Synchronization in constant delay and time-varying coupling delay complex networks are investigated, respectively. Numerical simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Biomedical applications engineering tasks

Science.gov (United States)

Laenger, C. J., Sr.

1976-01-01

The engineering tasks performed in response to needs articulated by clinicians are described. Initial contacts were made with these clinician-technology requestors by the Southwest Research Institute NASA Biomedical Applications Team. The basic purpose of the program was to effectively transfer aerospace technology into functional hardware to solve real biomedical problems.

Comparison of concept recognizers for building the Open Biomedical Annotator

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rubin Daniel

2009-09-01

Full Text Available Abstract The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO is developing a system for automated, ontology-based access to online biomedical resources (Shah NH, et al.: Ontology-driven indexing of public datasets for translational bioinformatics. BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10(Suppl 2:S1. The system's indexing workflow processes the text metadata of diverse resources such as datasets from GEO and ArrayExpress to annotate and index them with concepts from appropriate ontologies. This indexing requires the use of a concept-recognition tool to identify ontology concepts in the resource's textual metadata. In this paper, we present a comparison of two concept recognizers – NLM's MetaMap and the University of Michigan's Mgrep. We utilize a number of data sources and dictionaries to evaluate the concept recognizers in terms of precision, recall, speed of execution, scalability and customizability. Our evaluations demonstrate that Mgrep has a clear edge over MetaMap for large-scale service oriented applications. Based on our analysis we also suggest areas of potential improvements for Mgrep. We have subsequently used Mgrep to build the Open Biomedical Annotator service. The Annotator service has access to a large dictionary of biomedical terms derived from the United Medical Language System (UMLS and NCBO ontologies. The Annotator also leverages the hierarchical structure of the ontologies and their mappings to expand annotations. The Annotator service is available to the community as a REST Web service for creating ontology-based annotations of their data.

Piezoelectric nanomaterials for biomedical applications

CERN Document Server

Menciassi, Arianna

2012-01-01

Nanoscale structures and materials have been explored in many biological applications because of their novel and impressive physical and chemical properties. Such properties allow remarkable opportunities to study and interact with complex biological processes. This book analyses the state of the art of piezoelectric nanomaterials and introduces their applications in the biomedical field. Despite their impressive potentials, piezoelectric materials have not yet received significant attention for bio-applications. This book shows that the exploitation of piezoelectric nanoparticles in nanomedicine is possible and realistic, and their impressive physical properties can be useful for several applications, ranging from sensors and transducers for the detection of biomolecules to “sensible” substrates for tissue engineering or cell stimulation.

Protein-gold nanoparticle interactions and their possible impact on biomedical applications

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Liu, Jingying; Peng, Qiang

2017-01-01

) have critically affected physiological to therapeutic responses. The complexity and uncontrollability of AuNP-PC formation limited the clinical applications of AuNP, e.g. AuNP-based drug delivery systems or imaging agent. Thus, even intensive attempts have been made for in vitro characterizations of PC...... a detailed description of protein-AuNP interaction and launch an interesting discussion on how to use such interaction for smart and controlled AuNPs delivery, which would be a topic of widespread interest.......In the past few years, concerns of protein-gold nanoparticles (AuNP) interaction have been continuously growing in numerous potential biomedical applications. Despite the advances in tunable size, shape and excellent biocompatibility, unpredictable adverse effects related with protein corona (PC...

High performance flexible electronics for biomedical devices.

Science.gov (United States)

Salvatore, Giovanni A; Munzenrieder, Niko; Zysset, Christoph; Kinkeldei, Thomas; Petti, Luisa; Troster, Gerhard

2014-01-01

Plastic electronics is soft, deformable and lightweight and it is suitable for the realization of devices which can form an intimate interface with the body, be implanted or integrated into textile for wearable and biomedical applications. Here, we present flexible electronics based on amorphous oxide semiconductors (a-IGZO) whose performance can achieve MHz frequency even when bent around hair. We developed an assembly technique to integrate complex electronic functionalities into textile while preserving the softness of the garment. All this and further developments can open up new opportunities in health monitoring, biotechnology and telemedicine.

Multi-agent and complex systems

CERN Document Server

Ren, Fenghui; Fujita, Katsuhide; Zhang, Minjie; Ito, Takayuki

2017-01-01

This book provides a description of advanced multi-agent and artificial intelligence technologies for the modeling and simulation of complex systems, as well as an overview of the latest scientific efforts in this field. A complex system features a large number of interacting components, whose aggregate activities are nonlinear and self-organized. A multi-agent system is a group or society of agents which interact with others cooperatively and/or competitively in order to reach their individual or common goals. Multi-agent systems are suitable for modeling and simulation of complex systems, which is difficult to accomplish using traditional computational approaches.

European Conference on Complex Systems 2012

CERN Document Server

Kirkilionis, Markus; Nicolis, Gregoire

2013-01-01

The European Conference on Complex Systems, held under the patronage of the Complex Systems Society, is an annual event that has become the leading European conference devoted to complexity science. ECCS'12, its ninth edition, took place in Brussels, during the first week of September 2012. It gathered about 650 scholars representing a wide range of topics relating to complex systems research, with emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches. More specifically, the following tracks were covered:  1. Foundations of Complex Systems 2. Complexity, Information and Computation 3. Prediction, Policy and Planning, Environment 4. Biological Complexity 5. Interacting Populations, Collective Behavior 6. Social Systems, Economics and Finance This book contains a selection of the contributions presented at the conference and its satellite meetings. Its contents reflect the extent, diversity and richness of research areas in the field, both fundamental and applied.  

Frontiers in biomedical engineering and biotechnology.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Feng; Goodarzi, Ali; Wang, Haifeng; Stasiak, Joanna; Sun, Jianbo; Zhou, Yu

2014-01-01

The 2nd International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology (iCBEB 2013), held in Wuhan on 11–13 October 2013, is an annual conference that aims at providing an opportunity for international and national researchers and practitioners to present the most recent advances and future challenges in the fields of Biomedical Information, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology. The papers published by this issue are selected from this conference, which witnesses the frontier in the field of Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, which particularly has helped improving the level of clinical diagnosis in medical work.

[Master course in biomedical engineering].

Science.gov (United States)

Jobbágy, Akos; Benyó, Zoltán; Monos, Emil

2009-11-22

The Bologna Declaration aims at harmonizing the European higher education structure. In accordance with the Declaration, biomedical engineering will be offered as a master (MSc) course also in Hungary, from year 2009. Since 1995 biomedical engineering course has been held in cooperation of three universities: Semmelweis University, Budapest Veterinary University, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics. One of the latter's faculties, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, has been responsible for the course. Students could start their biomedical engineering studies - usually in parallel with their first degree course - after they collected at least 180 ECTS credits. Consequently, the biomedical engineering course could have been considered as a master course even before the Bologna Declaration. Students had to collect 130 ECTS credits during the six-semester course. This is equivalent to four-semester full-time studies, because during the first three semesters the curriculum required to gain only one third of the usual ECTS credits. The paper gives a survey on the new biomedical engineering master course, briefly summing up also the subjects in the curriculum.

Operational results for the raster scanning power supply system constructed at the Bevalac Biomedical Facility

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Stover, G.; Halliwell, J.; Nyman, M.; Dwinell, R.

1989-03-01

A raster scanning power supply for controlling an 8.0 Tesla-meter relativistic heavy-ion beam at the Biomedical Facility has been recently completed and is undergoing electrical testing before on- line operation in 1989. The scanner system will provide tightly controlled beam uniformity and off-axis treatment profiles with large aspect ratios and unusual dimensions. This article will discuss original specifications, agreement with measured results and special device performance (i.e. GTOs, FET actuator assembly, etc.). 5 refs., 4 figs

Hermetic diamond capsules for biomedical implants enabled by gold active braze alloys.

Science.gov (United States)

Lichter, Samantha G; Escudié, Mathilde C; Stacey, Alastair D; Ganesan, Kumaravelu; Fox, Kate; Ahnood, Arman; Apollo, Nicholas V; Kua, Dunstan C; Lee, Aaron Z; McGowan, Ceara; Saunders, Alexia L; Burns, Owen; Nayagam, David A X; Williams, Richard A; Garrett, David J; Meffin, Hamish; Prawer, Steven

2015-01-01

As the field of biomedical implants matures the functionality of implants is rapidly increasing. In the field of neural prostheses this is particularly apparent as researchers strive to build devices that interact with highly complex neural systems such as vision, hearing, touch and movement. A retinal implant, for example, is a highly complex device and the surgery, training and rehabilitation requirements involved in deploying such devices are extensive. Ideally, such devices will be implanted only once and will continue to function effectively for the lifetime of the patient. The first and most pivotal factor that determines device longevity is the encapsulation that separates the sensitive electronics of the device from the biological environment. This paper describes the realisation of a free standing device encapsulation made from diamond, the most impervious, long lasting and biochemically inert material known. A process of laser micro-machining and brazing is described detailing the fabrication of hermetic electrical feedthroughs and laser weldable seams using a 96.4% gold active braze alloy, another material renowned for biochemical longevity. Accelerated ageing of the braze alloy, feedthroughs and hermetic capsules yielded no evidence of corrosion and no loss of hermeticity. Samples of the gold braze implanted for 15 weeks, in vivo, caused minimal histopathological reaction and results were comparable to those obtained from medical grade silicone controls. The work described represents a first account of a free standing, fully functional hermetic diamond encapsulation for biomedical implants, enabled by gold active alloy brazing and laser micro-machining. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Reduction of Subjective and Objective System Complexity

Science.gov (United States)

Watson, Michael D.

2015-01-01

Occam's razor is often used in science to define the minimum criteria to establish a physical or philosophical idea or relationship. Albert Einstein is attributed the saying "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler". These heuristic ideas are based on a belief that there is a minimum state or set of states for a given system or phenomena. In looking at system complexity, these heuristics point us to an idea that complexity can be reduced to a minimum. How then, do we approach a reduction in complexity? Complexity has been described as a subjective concept and an objective measure of a system. Subjective complexity is based on human cognitive comprehension of the functions and inter relationships of a system. Subjective complexity is defined by the ability to fully comprehend the system. Simplifying complexity, in a subjective sense, is thus gaining a deeper understanding of the system. As Apple's Jonathon Ive has stated," It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep". Simplicity is not the absence of complexity but a deeper understanding of complexity. Subjective complexity, based on this human comprehension, cannot then be discerned from the sociological concept of ignorance. The inability to comprehend a system can be either a lack of knowledge, an inability to understand the intricacies of a system, or both. Reduction in this sense is based purely on a cognitive ability to understand the system and no system then may be truly complex. From this view, education and experience seem to be the keys to reduction or eliminating complexity. Objective complexity, is the measure of the systems functions and interrelationships which exist independent of human comprehension. Jonathon Ive's statement does not say that complexity is removed, only that the complexity is understood. From this standpoint, reduction of complexity can be approached

[Biomedical waste management in five hospitals in Dakar, Senegal].

Science.gov (United States)

Ndiaye, M; El Metghari, L; Soumah, M M; Sow, M L

2012-10-01

Biomedical waste is currently a real health and environmental concern. In this regard, a study was conducted in 5 hospitals in Dakar to review their management of biomedical waste and to formulate recommendations. This is a descriptive cross-sectional study conducted from 1 April to 31 July 2010 in five major hospitals of Dakar. A questionnaire administered to hospital managers, heads of departments, residents and heads of hospital hygiene departments as well as interviews conducted with healthcare personnel and operators of waste incinerators made it possible to assess mechanisms and knowledge on biomedical waste management. Content analysis of interviews, observations and a data sheet allowed processing the data thus gathered. Of the 150 questionnaires distributed, 98 responses were obtained representing a response rate of 65.3%. An interview was conducted with 75 employees directly involved in the management of biomedical waste and observations were made on biomedical waste management in 86 hospital services. Sharps as well as blood and liquid waste were found in all services except in pharmacies, pharmaceutical waste in 66 services, infectious waste in 49 services and anatomical waste in 11 services. Sorting of biomedical waste was ill-adapted in 53.5% (N = 46) of services and the use of the colour-coding system effective in 31.4% (N = 27) of services. Containers for the safe disposal of sharps were available in 82.5% (N = 71) of services and were effectively utilized in 51.1% (N = 44) of these services. In most services, an illadapted packaging was observed with the use of plastic bottles and bins for waste collection and overfilled containers. With the exception of Hôpital Principal, the main storage area was in open air, unsecured, with biomedical waste littered on the floor and often mixed with waste similar to household refuse. The transfer of biomedical waste to the main storage area was done using trolleys or carts in 67.4% (N = 58) of services and

CONAN : Text Mining in the Biomedical Domain

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Malik, R.

2006-01-01

This thesis is about Text Mining. Extracting important information from literature. In the last years, the number of biomedical articles and journals is growing exponentially. Scientists might not find the information they want because of the large number of publications. Therefore a system was

Localization and Tracking of Implantable Biomedical Sensors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ilknur Umay

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Implantable sensor systems are effective tools for biomedical diagnosis, visualization and treatment of various health conditions, attracting the interest of researchers, as well as healthcare practitioners. These systems efficiently and conveniently provide essential data of the body part being diagnosed, such as gastrointestinal (temperature, pH, pressure parameter values, blood glucose and pressure levels and electrocardiogram data. Such data are first transmitted from the implantable sensor units to an external receiver node or network and then to a central monitoring and control (computer unit for analysis, diagnosis and/or treatment. Implantable sensor units are typically in the form of mobile microrobotic capsules or implanted stationary (body-fixed units. In particular, capsule-based systems have attracted significant research interest recently, with a variety of applications, including endoscopy, microsurgery, drug delivery and biopsy. In such implantable sensor systems, one of the most challenging problems is the accurate localization and tracking of the microrobotic sensor unit (e.g., robotic capsule inside the human body. This article presents a literature review of the existing localization and tracking techniques for robotic implantable sensor systems with their merits and limitations and possible solutions of the proposed localization methods. The article also provides a brief discussion on the connection and cooperation of such techniques with wearable biomedical sensor systems.

Evolving technologies drive the new roles of Biomedical Engineering.

Science.gov (United States)

Frisch, P H; St Germain, J; Lui, W

2008-01-01

Rapidly changing technology coupled with the financial impact of organized health care, has required hospital Biomedical Engineering organizations to augment their traditional operational and business models to increase their role in developing enhanced clinical applications utilizing new and evolving technologies. The deployment of these technology based applications has required Biomedical Engineering organizations to re-organize to optimize the manner in which they provide and manage services. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has implemented a strategy to explore evolving technologies integrating them into enhanced clinical applications while optimally utilizing the expertise of the traditional Biomedical Engineering component (Clinical Engineering) to provide expanded support in technology / equipment management, device repair, preventive maintenance and integration with legacy clinical systems. Specifically, Biomedical Engineering is an integral component of the Medical Physics Department which provides comprehensive and integrated support to the Center in advanced physical, technical and engineering technology. This organizational structure emphasizes the integration and collaboration between a spectrum of technical expertise for clinical support and equipment management roles. The high cost of clinical equipment purchases coupled with the increasing cost of service has driven equipment management responsibilities to include significant business and financial aspects to provide a cost effective service model. This case study details the dynamics of these expanded roles, future initiatives and benefits for Biomedical Engineering and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Increase of Organization in Complex Systems

OpenAIRE

Georgiev, Georgi Yordanov; Daly, Michael; Gombos, Erin; Vinod, Amrit; Hoonjan, Gajinder

2013-01-01

Measures of complexity and entropy have not converged to a single quantitative description of levels of organization of complex systems. The need for such a measure is increasingly necessary in all disciplines studying complex systems. To address this problem, starting from the most fundamental principle in Physics, here a new measure for quantity of organization and rate of self-organization in complex systems based on the principle of least (stationary) action is applied to a model system -...

Biomedical Engineering in Modern Society

Science.gov (United States)

Attinger, E. O.

1971-01-01

Considers definition of biomedical engineering (BME) and how biomedical engineers should be trained. State of the art descriptions of BME and BME education are followed by a brief look at the future of BME. (TS)

MIMI: Multimodality, Multiresource, Information Integration Environment for Biomedical Core Facilities

OpenAIRE

Szymanski, Jacek; Wilson, David L.; Zhang, Guo-Qiang

2007-01-01

The rapid expansion of biomedical research has brought substantial scientific and administrative data management challenges to modern core facilities. Scientifically, a core facility must be able to manage experimental workflow and the corresponding set of large and complex scientific data. It must also disseminate experimental data to relevant researchers in a secure and expedient manner that facilitates collaboration and provides support for data interpretation and analysis. Administrativel...

Biomedical tracers: technetium-99 m complexing sulfur polydentate ligands

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bendennoune, A.

1994-01-01

Cyclic and acyclic tetra sulfur ligands have been synthesized and some of them have been labelled with technetium-99m. These works have two different aims: 1- Development of methods permitting to obtain easily potential technetium complexing sulfur polydentate chelates. 2- Research of positive and neutral complexes of this metal likely to replace thalium-201 in the coronary flow estimation and [TcO-HMPAO] sup 0 complex in the cerebral scintigraphy, respectively. In this work, first, different ways for obtaining dithioetherdithiols and cyclic tetrathioethers containing functional groups have been carried out, then complexation of the core of nitrutechnetium (TcN) sup 2+ at tracers scale, by dithioetherdithiols, using exchange reaction with [sup 9 sup 9 sup m TcNCl sub 4 ] sup - ion complex or sup 99 sup m TcN Cl sub 2 [P(CH sub 2 CH sub 2 CN) sub 3 ] sub 2 has been studied. Finally, biological distribution in swiss mouse of these technetiated complexes has been studied. 135 refs., 30 figs., 13 tabs. (F.M.)

Comparing a rule based vs. statistical system for automatic categorization of MEDLINE documents according to biomedical specialty

OpenAIRE

Humphrey, Susanne M.; Névéol, Aurélie; Browne, Allen; Gobeill, Julien; Ruch, Patrick; Darmoni, Stéfan J.

2010-01-01

Automatic document categorization is an important research problem in Information Science and Natural Language Processing. Many applications, including Word Sense Disambiguation and Information Retrieval in large collections, can benefit from such categorization. This paper focuses on automatic categorization of documents from the biomedical literature into broad discipline-based categories. Two different systems are described and contrasted: CISMeF, which uses rules based on human indexing o...

Hybrid brain-computer interface for biomedical cyber-physical system application using wireless embedded EEG systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Chai, Rifai; Naik, Ganesh R; Ling, Sai Ho; Nguyen, Hung T

2017-01-07

One of the key challenges of the biomedical cyber-physical system is to combine cognitive neuroscience with the integration of physical systems to assist people with disabilities. Electroencephalography (EEG) has been explored as a non-invasive method of providing assistive technology by using brain electrical signals. This paper presents a unique prototype of a hybrid brain computer interface (BCI) which senses a combination classification of mental task, steady state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) and eyes closed detection using only two EEG channels. In addition, a microcontroller based head-mounted battery-operated wireless EEG sensor combined with a separate embedded system is used to enhance portability, convenience and cost effectiveness. This experiment has been conducted with five healthy participants and five patients with tetraplegia. Generally, the results show comparable classification accuracies between healthy subjects and tetraplegia patients. For the offline artificial neural network classification for the target group of patients with tetraplegia, the hybrid BCI system combines three mental tasks, three SSVEP frequencies and eyes closed, with average classification accuracy at 74% and average information transfer rate (ITR) of the system of 27 bits/min. For the real-time testing of the intentional signal on patients with tetraplegia, the average success rate of detection is 70% and the speed of detection varies from 2 to 4 s.

Anti-synchronization between different chaotic complex systems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Liu Ping; Liu Shutang

2011-01-01

Many studies on the anti-synchronization of nonlinear real dynamic systems have been carried out, whereas the anti-synchronization of chaotic complex systems has not been studied extensively. In this work, the anti-synchronization between a new chaotic complex system and a complex Lorenz system and that between a new chaotic complex system and a complex Lue system were separately investigated by active control and nonlinear control methods, and explicit expressions were derived for the controllers that are used to achieve the anti-synchronization of chaotic complex systems. These expressions were tested numerically and excellent agreement was found. Concerning the new chaotic complex system, we discuss its dynamical properties including dissipation, chaotic behavior, fixed points, and their stability and invariance.

Complexity of Economical Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

G. P. Pavlos

2015-01-01

Full Text Available In this study new theoretical concepts are described concerning the interpretation of economical complex dynamics. In addition a summary of an extended algorithm of nonlinear time series analysis is provided which is applied not only in economical time series but also in other physical complex systems (e.g. [22, 24]. In general, Economy is a vast and complicated set of arrangements and actions wherein agents—consumers, firms, banks, investors, government agencies—buy and sell, speculate, trade, oversee, bring products into being, offer services, invest in companies, strategize, explore, forecast, compete, learn, innovate, and adapt. As a result the economic and financial variables such as foreign exchange rates, gross domestic product, interest rates, production, stock market prices and unemployment exhibit large-amplitude and aperiodic fluctuations evident in complex systems. Thus, the Economics can be considered as spatially distributed non-equilibrium complex system, for which new theoretical concepts, such as Tsallis non extensive statistical mechanics and strange dynamics, percolation, nonGaussian, multifractal and multiscale dynamics related to fractional Langevin equations can be used for modeling and understanding of the economical complexity locally or globally.

Customizable Electronic Laboratory Online (CELO): A Web-based Data Management System Builder for Biomedical Research Laboratories

Science.gov (United States)

Fong, Christine; Brinkley, James F.

2006-01-01

A common challenge among today’s biomedical research labs is managing growing amounts of research data. In order to reduce the time and resource costs of building data management tools, we designed the Customizable Electronic Laboratory Online (CELO) system. CELO automatically creates a generic database and web interface for laboratories that submit a simple web registration form. Laboratories can then use a collection of predefined XML templates to assist with the design of a database schema. Users can immediately utilize the web-based system to query data, manage multimedia files, and securely share data remotely over the internet. PMID:17238541

A Literature Survey on Wireless Power Transfer for Biomedical Devices

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Reem Shadid

2018-01-01

Full Text Available This paper provides a review and survey of research on power transfer for biomedical applications based on inductive coupling. There is interest in wireless power transfer (WPT for implantable and wearable biomedical devices, for example, heart pacemaker or implantable electrocardiogram (ECG recorders. This paper concentrates on the applications based on near-field power transfer methods, summarizes the main design features in the recent literature, and provides some information about the system model and coil optimization.

Neural prostheses in clinical applications--trends from precision mechanics towards biomedical microsystems in neurological rehabilitation.

Science.gov (United States)

Stieglitz, T; Schuettler, M; Koch, K P

2004-04-01

Neural prostheses partially restore body functions by technical nerve excitation after trauma or neurological diseases. External devices and implants have been developed since the early 1960s for many applications. Several systems have reached nowadays clinical practice: Cochlea implants help the deaf to hear, micturition is induced by bladder stimulators in paralyzed persons and deep brain stimulation helps patients with Parkinson's disease to participate in daily life again. So far, clinical neural prostheses are fabricated with means of precision mechanics. Since microsystem technology opens the opportunity to design and develop complex systems with a high number of electrodes to interface with the nervous systems, the opportunity for selective stimulation and complex implant scenarios seems to be feasible in the near future. The potentials and limitations with regard to biomedical microdevices are introduced and discussed in this paper. Target specifications are derived from existing implants and are discussed on selected applications that has been investigated in experimental research: a micromachined implant to interface a nerve stump with a sieve electrode, cuff electrodes with integrated electronics, and an epiretinal vision prosthesis.

Biomedical signal acquisition, processing and transmission using smartphone

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Roncagliolo, Pablo; Arredondo, Luis; Gonzalez, AgustIn

2007-01-01

This article describes technical aspects involved in the programming of a system of acquisition, processing and transmission of biomedical signals by using mobile devices. This task is aligned with the permanent development of new technologies for the diagnosis and sickness treatment, based on the feasibility of measuring continuously different variables as electrocardiographic signals, blood pressure, oxygen concentration, pulse or simply temperature. The contribution of this technology is settled on its portability and low cost, which allows its massive use. Specifically this work analyzes the feasibility of acquisition and the processing of signals from a standard smartphone. Work results allow to state that nowadays these equipments have enough processing capacity to execute signals acquisition systems. These systems along with external servers make it possible to imagine a near future where the possibility of making continuous measures of biomedical variables will not be restricted only to hospitals but will also begin to be more frequently used in the daily life and at home

Biomedical signal acquisition, processing and transmission using smartphone

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Roncagliolo, Pablo [Department of Electronics, Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, Casilla 110-V, ValparaIso (Chile); Arredondo, Luis [Department of Biomedical Engineering, Universidad de ValparaIso, Casilla 123-V, ValparaIso (Chile); Gonzalez, AgustIn [Department of Electronics, Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa MarIa, Casilla 110-V, ValparaIso (Chile)

2007-11-15

This article describes technical aspects involved in the programming of a system of acquisition, processing and transmission of biomedical signals by using mobile devices. This task is aligned with the permanent development of new technologies for the diagnosis and sickness treatment, based on the feasibility of measuring continuously different variables as electrocardiographic signals, blood pressure, oxygen concentration, pulse or simply temperature. The contribution of this technology is settled on its portability and low cost, which allows its massive use. Specifically this work analyzes the feasibility of acquisition and the processing of signals from a standard smartphone. Work results allow to state that nowadays these equipments have enough processing capacity to execute signals acquisition systems. These systems along with external servers make it possible to imagine a near future where the possibility of making continuous measures of biomedical variables will not be restricted only to hospitals but will also begin to be more frequently used in the daily life and at home.

Biomedical signal acquisition, processing and transmission using smartphone

Science.gov (United States)

Roncagliolo, Pablo; Arredondo, Luis; González, Agustín

2007-11-01

This article describes technical aspects involved in the programming of a system of acquisition, processing and transmission of biomedical signals by using mobile devices. This task is aligned with the permanent development of new technologies for the diagnosis and sickness treatment, based on the feasibility of measuring continuously different variables as electrocardiographic signals, blood pressure, oxygen concentration, pulse or simply temperature. The contribution of this technology is settled on its portability and low cost, which allows its massive use. Specifically this work analyzes the feasibility of acquisition and the processing of signals from a standard smartphone. Work results allow to state that nowadays these equipments have enough processing capacity to execute signals acquisition systems. These systems along with external servers make it possible to imagine a near future where the possibility of making continuous measures of biomedical variables will not be restricted only to hospitals but will also begin to be more frequently used in the daily life and at home.

Modeling Complex Systems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Schreckenberg, M

2004-01-01

This book by Nino Boccara presents a compilation of model systems commonly termed as 'complex'. It starts with a definition of the systems under consideration and how to build up a model to describe the complex dynamics. The subsequent chapters are devoted to various categories of mean-field type models (differential and recurrence equations, chaos) and of agent-based models (cellular automata, networks and power-law distributions). Each chapter is supplemented by a number of exercises and their solutions. The table of contents looks a little arbitrary but the author took the most prominent model systems investigated over the years (and up until now there has been no unified theory covering the various aspects of complex dynamics). The model systems are explained by looking at a number of applications in various fields. The book is written as a textbook for interested students as well as serving as a comprehensive reference for experts. It is an ideal source for topics to be presented in a lecture on dynamics of complex systems. This is the first book on this 'wide' topic and I have long awaited such a book (in fact I planned to write it myself but this is much better than I could ever have written it!). Only section 6 on cellular automata is a little too limited to the author's point of view and one would have expected more about the famous Domany-Kinzel model (and more accurate citation!). In my opinion this is one of the best textbooks published during the last decade and even experts can learn a lot from it. Hopefully there will be an actualization after, say, five years since this field is growing so quickly. The price is too high for students but this, unfortunately, is the normal case today. Nevertheless I think it will be a great success! (book review)

The biomedical discourse relation bank

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joshi Aravind

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Identification of discourse relations, such as causal and contrastive relations, between situations mentioned in text is an important task for biomedical text-mining. A biomedical text corpus annotated with discourse relations would be very useful for developing and evaluating methods for biomedical discourse processing. However, little effort has been made to develop such an annotated resource. Results We have developed the Biomedical Discourse Relation Bank (BioDRB, in which we have annotated explicit and implicit discourse relations in 24 open-access full-text biomedical articles from the GENIA corpus. Guidelines for the annotation were adapted from the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB, which has discourse relations annotated over open-domain news articles. We introduced new conventions and modifications to the sense classification. We report reliable inter-annotator agreement of over 80% for all sub-tasks. Experiments for identifying the sense of explicit discourse connectives show the connective itself as a highly reliable indicator for coarse sense classification (accuracy 90.9% and F1 score 0.89. These results are comparable to results obtained with the same classifier on the PDTB data. With more refined sense classification, there is degradation in performance (accuracy 69.2% and F1 score 0.28, mainly due to sparsity in the data. The size of the corpus was found to be sufficient for identifying the sense of explicit connectives, with classifier performance stabilizing at about 1900 training instances. Finally, the classifier performs poorly when trained on PDTB and tested on BioDRB (accuracy 54.5% and F1 score 0.57. Conclusion Our work shows that discourse relations can be reliably annotated in biomedical text. Coarse sense disambiguation of explicit connectives can be done with high reliability by using just the connective as a feature, but more refined sense classification requires either richer features or more

Biomedical Science Technologists in Lagos Universities: Meeting ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Biomedical Science Technologists in Lagos Universities: Meeting Modern Standards ... like to see in biomedical science in Nigeria; 5) their knowledge of ten state-of-the-arts ... KEY WORDS: biomedical science, state-of-the-arts, technical staff ...

ETHICAL REVIEW OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH IN BELARUS: CURRENT STATUS, PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES.

Science.gov (United States)

Famenka, Andrei

2011-04-01

The paper provides description of the system of ethical review for biomedical research in Belarus, with special emphasis on its historical background, legal and regulatory framework, structure and functioning. It concludes that the situation with research ethics in Belarus corresponds to the tendency of bureaucratic approach to establishment of systems of ethical review for biomedical research, observed in a number of countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Different social, economical and political factors of transition have major impact on capacities of the Belarusian RECs to ensure adequate protection of human subjects. Among the main problems identified are non-equivalent stringency of ethical review for different types of biomedical research; lack of independence, multidisciplinarity, pluralism and lay representation experienced by RECs; low level of research ethics education and transparency of RECs activities. Recommendations are made to raise the issue of research ethics on the national agenda in order to develop and maintain the research ethics system capable to effectively protect research participants and promote ethical conduct in research.

Defining Compensable Injury in Biomedical Research.

Science.gov (United States)

Larkin, Megan E

2015-01-01

Biomedical research provides a core social good by enabling medical progress. In the twenty-first century alone, this includes reducing transmission of HIV/AIDS, developing innovative therapies for cancer patients, and exploring the possibilities of personalized medicine. In order to continue to advance medical science, research relies on the voluntary participation of human subjects. Because research is inherently uncertain, unintended harm is an inevitable part of the research enterprise. Currently, injured research participants in the United States must turn to the “litigation lottery” of the tort system in search of compensation. This state of affairs fails research participants, who are too often left uncompensated for devastating losses, and makes the United States an outlier in the international community. In spite of forty years’ worth of Presidential Commissions and other respected voices calling for the development of a no-fault compensation system, no progress has been made to date. One of the reasons for this lack of progress is the failure to develop a coherent ethical basis for an obligation to provide compensation for research related injuries. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of a clear definition of “compensable injury” in the biomedical research context. This article makes a number of important contributions to the scholarship in this growing field. To begin, it examines compensation systems already in existence and concludes that there are four main definitional elements that must be used to define “compensable injury.” Next, it examines the justifications that have been put forth as the basis for an ethical obligation to provide compensation, and settles on retrospective nonmaleficence and distributive and compensatory justice as the most salient and persuasive. Finally, it uses the regulatory elements and the justifications discussed in the first two sections to develop a well-rounded definition of “compensable injury�

Improving validity of informed consent for biomedical research in Zambia using a laboratory exposure intervention.

Science.gov (United States)

Zulu, Joseph Mumba; Lisulo, Mpala Mwanza; Besa, Ellen; Kaonga, Patrick; Chisenga, Caroline C; Chomba, Mumba; Simuyandi, Michelo; Banda, Rosemary; Kelly, Paul

2014-01-01

Complex biomedical research can lead to disquiet in communities with limited exposure to scientific discussions, leading to rumours or to high drop-out rates. We set out to test an intervention designed to address apprehensions commonly encountered in a community where literacy is uncommon, and where complex biomedical research has been conducted for over a decade. We aimed to determine if it could improve the validity of consent. Data were collected using focus group discussions, key informant interviews and observations. We designed an intervention that exposed participants to a detailed demonstration of laboratory processes. Each group was interviewed twice in a day, before and after exposure to the intervention in order to assess changes in their views. Factors that motivated people to participate in invasive biomedical research included a desire to stay healthy because of the screening during the recruitment process, regular advice from doctors, free medical services, and trust in the researchers. Inhibiting factors were limited knowledge about samples taken from their bodies during endoscopic procedures, the impact of endoscopy on the function of internal organs, and concerns about the use of biomedical samples. The belief that blood can be used for Satanic practices also created insecurities about drawing of blood samples. Further inhibiting factors included a fear of being labelled as HIV positive if known to consult heath workers repeatedly, and gender inequality. Concerns about the use and storage of blood and tissue samples were overcome by a laboratory exposure intervention. Selecting a group of members from target community and engaging them in a laboratory exposure intervention could be a useful tool for enhancing specific aspects of consent for biomedical research. Further work is needed to determine the extent to which improved understanding permeates beyond the immediate group participating in the intervention.

Improving validity of informed consent for biomedical research in Zambia using a laboratory exposure intervention.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joseph Mumba Zulu

Full Text Available Complex biomedical research can lead to disquiet in communities with limited exposure to scientific discussions, leading to rumours or to high drop-out rates. We set out to test an intervention designed to address apprehensions commonly encountered in a community where literacy is uncommon, and where complex biomedical research has been conducted for over a decade. We aimed to determine if it could improve the validity of consent.Data were collected using focus group discussions, key informant interviews and observations. We designed an intervention that exposed participants to a detailed demonstration of laboratory processes. Each group was interviewed twice in a day, before and after exposure to the intervention in order to assess changes in their views.Factors that motivated people to participate in invasive biomedical research included a desire to stay healthy because of the screening during the recruitment process, regular advice from doctors, free medical services, and trust in the researchers. Inhibiting factors were limited knowledge about samples taken from their bodies during endoscopic procedures, the impact of endoscopy on the function of internal organs, and concerns about the use of biomedical samples. The belief that blood can be used for Satanic practices also created insecurities about drawing of blood samples. Further inhibiting factors included a fear of being labelled as HIV positive if known to consult heath workers repeatedly, and gender inequality. Concerns about the use and storage of blood and tissue samples were overcome by a laboratory exposure intervention.Selecting a group of members from target community and engaging them in a laboratory exposure intervention could be a useful tool for enhancing specific aspects of consent for biomedical research. Further work is needed to determine the extent to which improved understanding permeates beyond the immediate group participating in the intervention.

Complexity in Dynamical Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Moore, Cristopher David

The study of chaos has shown us that deterministic systems can have a kind of unpredictability, based on a limited knowledge of their initial conditions; after a finite time, the motion appears essentially random. This observation has inspired a general interest in the subject of unpredictability, and more generally, complexity; how can we characterize how "complex" a dynamical system is?. In this thesis, we attempt to answer this question with a paradigm of complexity that comes from computer science, we extract sets of symbol sequences, or languages, from a dynamical system using standard methods of symbolic dynamics; we then ask what kinds of grammars or automata are needed a generate these languages. This places them in the Chomsky heirarchy, which in turn tells us something about how subtle and complex the dynamical system's behavior is. This gives us insight into the question of unpredictability, since these automata can also be thought of as computers attempting to predict the system. In the culmination of the thesis, we find a class of smooth, two-dimensional maps which are equivalent to the highest class in the Chomsky heirarchy, the turning machine; they are capable of universal computation. Therefore, these systems possess a kind of unpredictability qualitatively different from the usual "chaos": even if the initial conditions are known exactly, questions about the system's long-term dynamics are undecidable. No algorithm exists to answer them. Although this kind of unpredictability has been discussed in the context of distributed, many-degree-of -freedom systems (for instance, cellular automata) we believe this is the first example of such phenomena in a smooth, finite-degree-of-freedom system.

Complex logistics audit system

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zuzana Marková

2010-02-01

Full Text Available Complex logistics audit system is a tool for realization of logistical audit in the company. The current methods for logistics auditare based on “ad hok” analysis of logisticsl system. This paper describes system for complex logistics audit. It is a global diagnosticsof logistics processes and functions of enterprise. The goal of logistics audit is to provide comparative documentation for managementabout state of logistics in company and to show the potential of logistics changes in order to achieve more effective companyperformance.

Additive Manufacturing of Biomedical Constructs with Biomimetic Structural Organizations.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Xiao; He, Jiankang; Zhang, Weijie; Jiang, Nan; Li, Dichen

2016-11-09

Additive manufacturing (AM), sometimes called three-dimensional (3D) printing, has attracted a lot of research interest and is presenting unprecedented opportunities in biomedical fields, because this technology enables the fabrication of biomedical constructs with great freedom and in high precision. An important strategy in AM of biomedical constructs is to mimic the structural organizations of natural biological organisms. This can be done by directly depositing cells and biomaterials, depositing biomaterial structures before seeding cells, or fabricating molds before casting biomaterials and cells. This review organizes the research advances of AM-based biomimetic biomedical constructs into three major directions: 3D constructs that mimic tubular and branched networks of vasculatures; 3D constructs that contains gradient interfaces between different tissues; and 3D constructs that have different cells positioned to create multicellular systems. Other recent advances are also highlighted, regarding the applications of AM for organs-on-chips, AM-based micro/nanostructures, and functional nanomaterials. Under this theme, multiple aspects of AM including imaging/characterization, material selection, design, and printing techniques are discussed. The outlook at the end of this review points out several possible research directions for the future.

Characteristics desired in clinical data warehouse for biomedical research.

Science.gov (United States)

Shin, Soo-Yong; Kim, Woo Sung; Lee, Jae-Ho

2014-04-01

Due to the unique characteristics of clinical data, clinical data warehouses (CDWs) have not been successful so far. Specifically, the use of CDWs for biomedical research has been relatively unsuccessful thus far. The characteristics necessary for the successful implementation and operation of a CDW for biomedical research have not clearly defined yet. THREE EXAMPLES OF CDWS WERE REVIEWED: a multipurpose CDW in a hospital, a CDW for independent multi-institutional research, and a CDW for research use in an institution. After reviewing the three CDW examples, we propose some key characteristics needed in a CDW for biomedical research. A CDW for research should include an honest broker system and an Institutional Review Board approval interface to comply with governmental regulations. It should also include a simple query interface, an anonymized data review tool, and a data extraction tool. Also, it should be a biomedical research platform for data repository use as well as data analysis. The proposed characteristics desired in a CDW may have limited transfer value to organizations in other countries. However, these analysis results are still valid in Korea, and we have developed clinical research data warehouse based on these desiderata.

[Computers in biomedical research: I. Analysis of bioelectrical signals].

Science.gov (United States)

Vivaldi, E A; Maldonado, P

2001-08-01

A personal computer equipped with an analog-to-digital conversion card is able to input, store and display signals of biomedical interest. These signals can additionally be submitted to ad-hoc software for analysis and diagnosis. Data acquisition is based on the sampling of a signal at a given rate and amplitude resolution. The automation of signal processing conveys syntactic aspects (data transduction, conditioning and reduction); and semantic aspects (feature extraction to describe and characterize the signal and diagnostic classification). The analytical approach that is at the basis of computer programming allows for the successful resolution of apparently complex tasks. Two basic principles involved are the definition of simple fundamental functions that are then iterated and the modular subdivision of tasks. These two principles are illustrated, respectively, by presenting the algorithm that detects relevant elements for the analysis of a polysomnogram, and the task flow in systems that automate electrocardiographic reports.

Measuring Complexity of SAP Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ilja Holub

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The paper discusses the reasons of complexity rise in ERP system SAP R/3. It proposes a method for measuring complexity of SAP. Based on this method, the computer program in ABAP for measuring complexity of particular SAP implementation is proposed as a tool for keeping ERP complexity under control. The main principle of the measurement method is counting the number of items or relations in the system. The proposed computer program is based on counting of records in organization tables in SAP.

European Conference on Complex Systems

CERN Document Server

Pellegrini, Francesco; Caldarelli, Guido; Merelli, Emanuela

2016-01-01

This work contains a stringent selection of extended contributions presented at the meeting of 2014 and its satellite meetings, reflecting scope, diversity and richness of research areas in the field, both fundamental and applied. The ECCS meeting, held under the patronage of the Complex Systems Society, is an annual event that has become the leading European conference devoted to complexity science. It offers cutting edge research and unique opportunities to study novel scientific approaches in a multitude of application areas. ECCS'14, its eleventh occurrence, took place in Lucca, Italy. It gathered some 650 scholars representing a wide range of topics relating to complex systems research, with emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches. The editors are among the best specialists in the area. The book is of great interest to scientists, researchers and graduate students in complexity, complex systems and networks.

Publishing priorities of biomedical research funders

Science.gov (United States)

Collins, Ellen

2013-01-01

Objectives To understand the publishing priorities, especially in relation to open access, of 10 UK biomedical research funders. Design Semistructured interviews. Setting 10 UK biomedical research funders. Participants 12 employees with responsibility for research management at 10 UK biomedical research funders; a purposive sample to represent a range of backgrounds and organisation types. Conclusions Publicly funded and large biomedical research funders are committed to open access publishing and are pleased with recent developments which have stimulated growth in this area. Smaller charitable funders are supportive of the aims of open access, but are concerned about the practical implications for their budgets and their funded researchers. Across the board, biomedical research funders are turning their attention to other priorities for sharing research outputs, including data, protocols and negative results. Further work is required to understand how smaller funders, including charitable funders, can support open access. PMID:24154520

Third International Conference on Complex Systems

CERN Document Server

Minai, Ali A; Unifying Themes in Complex Systems

2006-01-01

In recent years, scientists have applied the principles of complex systems science to increasingly diverse fields. The results have been nothing short of remarkable: their novel approaches have provided answers to long-standing questions in biology, ecology, physics, engineering, computer science, economics, psychology and sociology. The Third International Conference on Complex Systems attracted over 400 researchers from around the world. The conference aimed to encourage cross-fertilization between the many disciplines represented and to deepen our understanding of the properties common to all complex systems. This volume contains over 35 papers selected from those presented at the conference on topics including: self-organization in biology, ecological systems, language, economic modeling, ecological systems, artificial life, robotics, and complexity and art. ALI MINAI is an Affiliate of the New England Complex Systems Institute and an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engine...

Basics of biomedical ultrasound for engineers

CERN Document Server

Azhari, Haim

2010-01-01

"Basics of Biomedical Ultrasound for Engineers is a structured textbook for university engineering courses in biomedical ultrasound and for researchers in the field. This book offers a tool for building a solid understanding of biomedical ultrasound, and leads the novice through the field in a step-by-step manner. The book begins with the most basic definitions of waves, proceeds to ultrasounds in fluids, and then delves into solid ultrasounds, the most complicated kind of ultrasound. It encompasses a wide range of topics within biomedical ultrasound, from conceptual definitions of waves to the intricacies of focusing devices, transducers, and acoustic fields"--Provided by publisher.

Bridging the gap between clinicians and systems biologists: from network biology to translational biomedical research.

Science.gov (United States)

Jinawath, Natini; Bunbanjerdsuk, Sacarin; Chayanupatkul, Maneerat; Ngamphaiboon, Nuttapong; Asavapanumas, Nithi; Svasti, Jisnuson; Charoensawan, Varodom

2016-11-22

With the wealth of data accumulated from completely sequenced genomes and other high-throughput experiments, global studies of biological systems, by simultaneously investigating multiple biological entities (e.g. genes, transcripts, proteins), has become a routine. Network representation is frequently used to capture the presence of these molecules as well as their relationship. Network biology has been widely used in molecular biology and genetics, where several network properties have been shown to be functionally important. Here, we discuss how such methodology can be useful to translational biomedical research, where scientists traditionally focus on one or a small set of genes, diseases, and drug candidates at any one time. We first give an overview of network representation frequently used in biology: what nodes and edges represent, and review its application in preclinical research to date. Using cancer as an example, we review how network biology can facilitate system-wide approaches to identify targeted small molecule inhibitors. These types of inhibitors have the potential to be more specific, resulting in high efficacy treatments with less side effects, compared to the conventional treatments such as chemotherapy. Global analysis may provide better insight into the overall picture of human diseases, as well as identify previously overlooked problems, leading to rapid advances in medicine. From the clinicians' point of view, it is necessary to bridge the gap between theoretical network biology and practical biomedical research, in order to improve the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of the world's major diseases.

Advances in biomedical engineering

CERN Document Server

Brown, J H U

1973-01-01

Advances in Biomedical Engineering, Volume 2, is a collection of papers that discusses the basic sciences, the applied sciences of engineering, the medical sciences, and the delivery of health services. One paper discusses the models of adrenal cortical control, including the secretion and metabolism of cortisol (the controlled process), as well as the initiation and modulation of secretion of ACTH (the controller). Another paper discusses hospital computer systems-application problems, objective evaluation of technology, and multiple pathways for future hospital computer applications. The pos

Sixth International Conference on Complex Systems

CERN Document Server

Minai, Ali; Bar-Yam, Yaneer; Unifying Themes in Complex Systems

2008-01-01

The International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) creates a unique atmosphere for scientists of all fields, engineers, physicians, executives, and a host of other professionals to explore the common themes and applications of complex systems science. In June 2006, 500 participants convened in Boston for the sixth ICCS, exploring an array of topics, including networks, systems biology, evolution and ecology, nonlinear dynamics and pattern formation, as well as neural, psychological, psycho-social, socio-economic, and global systems. This volume selects 77 papers from over 300 presented at the conference. With this new volume, Unifying Themes in Complex Systems continues to build common ground between the wide-ranging domains of complex systems science.

Philosophy of complex systems

CERN Document Server

2011-01-01

The domain of nonlinear dynamical systems and its mathematical underpinnings has been developing exponentially for a century, the last 35 years seeing an outpouring of new ideas and applications and a concomitant confluence with ideas of complex systems and their applications from irreversible thermodynamics. A few examples are in meteorology, ecological dynamics, and social and economic dynamics. These new ideas have profound implications for our understanding and practice in domains involving complexity, predictability and determinism, equilibrium, control, planning, individuality, responsibility and so on. Our intention is to draw together in this volume, we believe for the first time, a comprehensive picture of the manifold philosophically interesting impacts of recent developments in understanding nonlinear systems and the unique aspects of their complexity. The book will focus specifically on the philosophical concepts, principles, judgments and problems distinctly raised by work in the domain of comple...

Large-scale Complex IT Systems

OpenAIRE

Sommerville, Ian; Cliff, Dave; Calinescu, Radu; Keen, Justin; Kelly, Tim; Kwiatkowska, Marta; McDermid, John; Paige, Richard

2011-01-01

This paper explores the issues around the construction of large-scale complex systems which are built as 'systems of systems' and suggests that there are fundamental reasons, derived from the inherent complexity in these systems, why our current software engineering methods and techniques cannot be scaled up to cope with the engineering challenges of constructing such systems. It then goes on to propose a research and education agenda for software engineering that identifies the major challen...

Large-scale complex IT systems

OpenAIRE

Sommerville, Ian; Cliff, Dave; Calinescu, Radu; Keen, Justin; Kelly, Tim; Kwiatkowska, Marta; McDermid, John; Paige, Richard

2012-01-01

12 pages, 2 figures This paper explores the issues around the construction of large-scale complex systems which are built as 'systems of systems' and suggests that there are fundamental reasons, derived from the inherent complexity in these systems, why our current software engineering methods and techniques cannot be scaled up to cope with the engineering challenges of constructing such systems. It then goes on to propose a research and education agenda for software engineering that ident...

International symposium on Biomedical Data Infrastructure (BDI 2013)

CERN Document Server

Dhillon, Sarinder; Advances in biomedical infrastructure 2013

2013-01-01

Current Biomedical Databases are independently administered in geographically distinct locations, lending them almost ideally to adoption of intelligent data management approaches. This book focuses on research issues, problems and opportunities in Biomedical Data Infrastructure identifying new issues and directions for future research in Biomedical Data and Information Retrieval, Semantics in Biomedicine, and Biomedical Data Modeling and Analysis. The book will be a useful guide for researchers, practitioners, and graduate-level students interested in learning state-of-the-art development in biomedical data management.

Time-Resolved Microfluorescence In Biomedical Diagnosis

Science.gov (United States)

Schneckenburger, Herbert

1985-02-01

A measuring system combining subnanosecond laser-induced fluorescence with microscopic signal detection was installed and used for diverse projects in the biomedical and environmental field. These projects are ranging from tumor diagnosis and enzymatic analysis to measurements of the activity of methanogenic bacteria which effect biogas production and waste water cleaning. The advantages of this method and its practical applicability are discussed.

Time Resolved Microfluorescence In Biomedical Diagnosis

Science.gov (United States)

Schneckenburger, Herbert

1985-12-01

A measuring system combining subnanosecond laser-induced fluorescence with microscopic signal detection was installed and used for diverse projects in the biomedical and environmental fields. These projects range from tumor diagnosis and enzymatic analysis to measurements of the activity of methanogenic bacteria, which affect biogas production and waste water cleaning. The advantages of this method and its practical applicability are discussed.

Professional Identification for Biomedical Engineers

Science.gov (United States)

Long, Francis M.

1973-01-01

Discusses four methods of professional identification in biomedical engineering including registration, certification, accreditation, and possible membership qualification of the societies. Indicates that the destiny of the biomedical engineer may be under the control of a new profession, neither the medical nor the engineering. (CC)

Egyptian Journal of Biomedical Sciences

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The Egyptian Journal of Biomedical Sciences publishes in all aspects of biomedical research sciences. Both basic and clinical research papers are welcomed. Vol 23 (2007). DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT Open Access DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT Subscription or Fee Access. Table of Contents. Articles. Phytochemical And ...

Desiderata for ontologies to be used in semantic annotation of biomedical documents.

Science.gov (United States)

Bada, Michael; Hunter, Lawrence

2011-02-01

A wealth of knowledge valuable to the translational research scientist is contained within the vast biomedical literature, but this knowledge is typically in the form of natural language. Sophisticated natural-language-processing systems are needed to translate text into unambiguous formal representations grounded in high-quality consensus ontologies, and these systems in turn rely on gold-standard corpora of annotated documents for training and testing. To this end, we are constructing the Colorado Richly Annotated Full-Text (CRAFT) Corpus, a collection of 97 full-text biomedical journal articles that are being manually annotated with the entire sets of terms from select vocabularies, predominantly from the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library. Our efforts in building this corpus has illuminated infelicities of these ontologies with respect to the semantic annotation of biomedical documents, and we propose desiderata whose implementation could substantially improve their utility in this task; these include the integration of overlapping terms across OBOs, the resolution of OBO-specific ambiguities, the integration of the BFO with the OBOs and the use of mid-level ontologies, the inclusion of noncanonical instances, and the expansion of relations and realizable entities. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A roadmap for caGrid, an enterprise Grid architecture for biomedical research.

Science.gov (United States)

Saltz, Joel; Hastings, Shannon; Langella, Stephen; Oster, Scott; Kurc, Tahsin; Payne, Philip; Ferreira, Renato; Plale, Beth; Goble, Carole; Ervin, David; Sharma, Ashish; Pan, Tony; Permar, Justin; Brezany, Peter; Siebenlist, Frank; Madduri, Ravi; Foster, Ian; Shanbhag, Krishnakant; Mead, Charlie; Chue Hong, Neil

2008-01-01

caGrid is a middleware system which combines the Grid computing, the service oriented architecture, and the model driven architecture paradigms to support development of interoperable data and analytical resources and federation of such resources in a Grid environment. The functionality provided by caGrid is an essential and integral component of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) program. This program is established by the National Cancer Institute as a nationwide effort to develop enabling informatics technologies for collaborative, multi-institutional biomedical research with the overarching goal of accelerating translational cancer research. Although the main application domain for caGrid is cancer research, the infrastructure provides a generic framework that can be employed in other biomedical research and healthcare domains. The development of caGrid is an ongoing effort, adding new functionality and improvements based on feedback and use cases from the community. This paper provides an overview of potential future architecture and tooling directions and areas of improvement for caGrid and caGrid-like systems. This summary is based on discussions at a roadmap workshop held in February with participants from biomedical research, Grid computing, and high performance computing communities.

5th International Conference on Complex Systems

CERN Document Server

Braha, Dan; Bar-Yam, Yaneer

2011-01-01

The International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) creates a unique atmosphere for scientists of all fields, engineers, physicians, executives, and a host of other professionals to explore common themes and applications of complex system science. With this new volume, Unifying Themes in Complex Systems continues to build common ground between the wide-ranging domains of complex system science.

7th International Conference on Complex Systems

CERN Document Server

Braha, Dan; Bar-Yam, Yaneer

2012-01-01

The International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) creates a unique atmosphere for scientists of all fields, engineers, physicians, executives, and a host of other professionals to explore common themes and applications of complex system science. With this new volume, Unifying Themes in Complex Systems continues to build common ground between the wide-ranging domains of complex system science.

BOSS: context-enhanced search for biomedical objects

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Choi Jaehoon

2012-04-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background There exist many academic search solutions and most of them can be put on either ends of spectrum: general-purpose search and domain-specific "deep" search systems. The general-purpose search systems, such as PubMed, offer flexible query interface, but churn out a list of matching documents that users have to go through the results in order to find the answers to their queries. On the other hand, the "deep" search systems, such as PPI Finder and iHOP, return the precompiled results in a structured way. Their results, however, are often found only within some predefined contexts. In order to alleviate these problems, we introduce a new search engine, BOSS, Biomedical Object Search System. Methods Unlike the conventional search systems, BOSS indexes segments, rather than documents. A segment refers to a Maximal Coherent Semantic Unit (MCSU such as phrase, clause or sentence that is semantically coherent in the given context (e.g., biomedical objects or their relations. For a user query, BOSS finds all matching segments, identifies the objects appearing in those segments, and aggregates the segments for each object. Finally, it returns the ranked list of the objects along with their matching segments. Results The working prototype of BOSS is available at http://boss.korea.ac.kr. The current version of BOSS has indexed abstracts of more than 20 million articles published during last 16 years from 1996 to 2011 across all science disciplines. Conclusion BOSS fills the gap between either ends of the spectrum by allowing users to pose context-free queries and by returning a structured set of results. Furthermore, BOSS exhibits the characteristic of good scalability, just as with conventional document search engines, because it is designed to use a standard document-indexing model with minimal modifications. Considering the features, BOSS notches up the technological level of traditional solutions for search on biomedical information.

Recent advances in engineering microparticles and their nascent utilization in biomedical delivery and diagnostic applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Choi, Andrew; Seo, Kyoung Duck; Kim, Do Wan; Kim, Bum Chang; Kim, Dong Sung

2017-02-14

Complex microparticles (MPs) bearing unique characteristics such as well-tailored sizes, various morphologies, and multi-compartments have been attempted to be produced by many researchers in the past decades. However, a conventionally used method of fabricating MPs, emulsion polymerization, has a limitation in achieving the aforementioned characteristics and several approaches such as the microfluidics-assisted (droplet-based microfluidics and flow lithography-based microfluidics), electrohydrodynamics (EHD)-based, centrifugation-based, and template-based methods have been recently suggested to overcome this limitation. The outstanding features of complex MPs engineered through these suggested methods have provided new opportunities for MPs to be applied in a wider range of applications including cell carriers, drug delivery agents, active pigments for display, microsensors, interface stabilizers, and catalyst substrates. Overall, the engineered MPs expose their potential particularly in the field of biomedical engineering as the increased complexity in the engineered MPs fulfills well the requirements of the high-end applications. This review outlines the current trends of newly developed techniques used for engineered MPs fabrication and focuses on the current state of engineered MPs in biomedical applications.

Semantic relatedness and similarity of biomedical terms: examining the effects of recency, size, and section of biomedical publications on the performance of word2vec.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhu, Yongjun; Yan, Erjia; Wang, Fei

2017-07-03

Understanding semantic relatedness and similarity between biomedical terms has a great impact on a variety of applications such as biomedical information retrieval, information extraction, and recommender systems. The objective of this study is to examine word2vec's ability in deriving semantic relatedness and similarity between biomedical terms from large publication data. Specifically, we focus on the effects of recency, size, and section of biomedical publication data on the performance of word2vec. We download abstracts of 18,777,129 articles from PubMed and 766,326 full-text articles from PubMed Central (PMC). The datasets are preprocessed and grouped into subsets by recency, size, and section. Word2vec models are trained on these subtests. Cosine similarities between biomedical terms obtained from the word2vec models are compared against reference standards. Performance of models trained on different subsets are compared to examine recency, size, and section effects. Models trained on recent datasets did not boost the performance. Models trained on larger datasets identified more pairs of biomedical terms than models trained on smaller datasets in relatedness task (from 368 at the 10% level to 494 at the 100% level) and similarity task (from 374 at the 10% level to 491 at the 100% level). The model trained on abstracts produced results that have higher correlations with the reference standards than the one trained on article bodies (i.e., 0.65 vs. 0.62 in the similarity task and 0.66 vs. 0.59 in the relatedness task). However, the latter identified more pairs of biomedical terms than the former (i.e., 344 vs. 498 in the similarity task and 339 vs. 503 in the relatedness task). Increasing the size of dataset does not always enhance the performance. Increasing the size of datasets can result in the identification of more relations of biomedical terms even though it does not guarantee better precision. As summaries of research articles, compared with article

Reliability of large and complex systems

CERN Document Server

Kolowrocki, Krzysztof

2014-01-01

Reliability of Large and Complex Systems, previously titled Reliability of Large Systems, is an innovative guide to the current state and reliability of large and complex systems. In addition to revised and updated content on the complexity and safety of large and complex mechanisms, this new edition looks at the reliability of nanosystems, a key research topic in nanotechnology science. The author discusses the importance of safety investigation of critical infrastructures that have aged or have been exposed to varying operational conditions. This reference provides an asympt

Microcontroller-based wireless recorder for biomedical signals.

Science.gov (United States)

Chien, C-N; Hsu, H-W; Jang, J-K; Rau, C-L; Jaw, F-S

2005-01-01

A portable multichannel system is described for the recording of biomedical signals wirelessly. Instead of using the conversional time-division analog-modulation method, the technique of digital multiplexing was applied to increase the number of signal channels to 4. Detailed design considerations and functional allocation of the system is discussed. The frontend unit was modularly designed to condition the input signal in an optimal manner. Then, the microcontroller handled the tasks of data conversion, wireless transmission, as well as providing the ability of simple preprocessing such as waveform averaging or rectification. The low-power nature of this microcontroller affords the benefit of battery operation and hence, patient isolation of the system. Finally, a single-chip receiver, which compatible with the RF transmitter of the microcontroller, was used to implement a compact interface with the host computer. An application of this portable recorder for low-back pain studies is shown. This device can simultaneously record one ECG and two surface EMG wirelessly, thus, is helpful in relieving patients' anxiety devising clinical measurement. Such an approach, microcontroller-based wireless measurement, could be an important trend for biomedical instrumentation and we help that this paper could be useful for other colleagues.

[Biomedical engineering today : An overview from the viewpoint of the German Biomedical Engineering Society].

Science.gov (United States)

Schlötelburg, C; Becks, T; Stieglitz, T

2010-08-01

Biomedical engineering is characterized by the interdisciplinary co-operation of technology, science, and ways of thinking, probably more than any other technological area. The close interaction of engineering and information sciences with medicine and biology results in innovative products and methods, but also requires high standards for the interdisciplinary transfer of ideas into products for patients' benefits. This article describes the situation of biomedical engineering in Germany. It displays characteristics of the medical device industry and ranks it with respect to the international market. The research landscape is described as well as up-to-date research topics and trends. The national funding situation of research in biomedical engineering is reviewed and existing innovation barriers are discussed.

A robust pointer segmentation in biomedical images toward building a visual ontology for biomedical article retrieval

Science.gov (United States)

You, Daekeun; Simpson, Matthew; Antani, Sameer; Demner-Fushman, Dina; Thoma, George R.

2013-01-01

Pointers (arrows and symbols) are frequently used in biomedical images to highlight specific image regions of interest (ROIs) that are mentioned in figure captions and/or text discussion. Detection of pointers is the first step toward extracting relevant visual features from ROIs and combining them with textual descriptions for a multimodal (text and image) biomedical article retrieval system. Recently we developed a pointer recognition algorithm based on an edge-based pointer segmentation method, and subsequently reported improvements made on our initial approach involving the use of Active Shape Models (ASM) for pointer recognition and region growing-based method for pointer segmentation. These methods contributed to improving the recall of pointer recognition but not much to the precision. The method discussed in this article is our recent effort to improve the precision rate. Evaluation performed on two datasets and compared with other pointer segmentation methods show significantly improved precision and the highest F1 score.

Geographical National Condition and Complex System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

WANG Jiayao

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The significance of studying the complex system of geographical national conditions lies in rationally expressing the complex relationships of the “resources-environment-ecology-economy-society” system. Aiming to the problems faced by the statistical analysis of geographical national conditions, including the disunity of research contents, the inconsistency of range, the uncertainty of goals, etc.the present paper conducted a range of discussions from the perspectives of concept, theory and method, and designed some solutions based on the complex system theory and coordination degree analysis methods.By analyzing the concepts of geographical national conditions, geographical national conditions survey and geographical national conditions statistical analysis, as well as investigating the relationships between theirs, the statistical contents and the analytical range of geographical national conditions are clarified and defined. This investigation also clarifies the goals of the statistical analysis by analyzing the basic characteristics of the geographical national conditions and the complex system, and the consistency between the analysis of the degree of coordination and statistical analyses. It outlines their goals, proposes a concept for the complex system of geographical national conditions, and it describes the concept. The complex system theory provides new theoretical guidance for the statistical analysis of geographical national conditions. The degree of coordination offers new approaches on how to undertake the analysis based on the measurement method and decision-making analysis scheme upon which the complex system of geographical national conditions is based. It analyzes the overall trend via the degree of coordination of the complex system on a macro level, and it determines the direction of remediation on a micro level based on the degree of coordination among various subsystems and of single systems. These results establish

Nanoparticle-Based Delivery System for Biomedical Applications of RNAi

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Yang, Chuanxu

RNA interference (RNAi) is a post-transcriptional gene silencing process triggered by double-strand RNA, including synthetic short interfering RNA (siRNA) and endogenous microRNA (miRNA). RNAi has attracted great attention for developing a new class of therapeutics, due to its capability to speci......RNA/miRNA and transport them to the action site in the target cells. This thesis describes the development of various nanocarriers for siRNA/miRNA delivery and investigate their potential biomedical applications including: anti-inflammation, tissue engineering and cancer...

African Journal of Biomedical Research

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The African Journal of biomedical Research was founded in 1998 as a joint project ... of the journal led to the formation of a group (Biomedical Communications Group, ... analysis of multidrug resistant aerobic gram-negative clinical isolates from a ... Dental formula and dental abnormalities observed in the Eidolon helvum ...

Plasticity of regulation of mannitol phosphotransferase system operon by CRP-cAMP complex in Vibrio cholerae.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhou, Yan Yan; Zhang, Hong Zhi; Liang, Wei Li; Zhang, Li Juan; Zhu, Jun; Kan, Biao

2013-10-01

The complex of the cyclic AMP receptor protein (CRP) and cAMP is an important transcriptional regulator of numerous genes in prokaryotes. The transport of mannitol through the phosphotransferase systems (PTS) is regulated by the CRP-cAMP complex. The aim of the study is to investigate how the CRP-cAMP complex acting on the mannitol PTS operon mtl of the Vibrio cholerae El Tor biotype. The crp mutant strain was generated by homologous recombination to assess the need of CRP to activate the mannitol PTS operon of V. cholerae El Tor. Electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA) and the reporter plasmid pBBRlux were used to confirm the role that the CRP-cAMP complex playing on the mannitol PTS operon mtl. In this study, we confirmed that CRP is strictly needed for the activation of the mtl operon. We further experimentally identified five CRP binding sites within the promoter region upstream of the mannitol PTS operon mtl of the Vibrio cholerae El Tor biotype and found that these sites display different affinities for CRP and provide different contributions to the activation of the operon. The five binding sites collectively confer the strong activation of mannitol transfer by CRP in V. cholerae, indicating an elaborate and subtle CRP activation mechanism. Copyright © 2013 The Editorial Board of Biomedical and Environmental Sciences. Published by China CDC. All rights reserved.

Special Issue: 3D Printing for Biomedical Engineering.

Science.gov (United States)

Chua, Chee Kai; Yeong, Wai Yee; An, Jia

2017-02-28

Three-dimensional (3D) printing has a long history of applications in biomedical engineering. The development and expansion of traditional biomedical applications are being advanced and enriched by new printing technologies. New biomedical applications such as bioprinting are highly attractive and trendy. This Special Issue aims to provide readers with a glimpse of the recent profile of 3D printing in biomedical research.

Text Mining in Biomedical Domain with Emphasis on Document Clustering.

Science.gov (United States)

Renganathan, Vinaitheerthan

2017-07-01

With the exponential increase in the number of articles published every year in the biomedical domain, there is a need to build automated systems to extract unknown information from the articles published. Text mining techniques enable the extraction of unknown knowledge from unstructured documents. This paper reviews text mining processes in detail and the software tools available to carry out text mining. It also reviews the roles and applications of text mining in the biomedical domain. Text mining processes, such as search and retrieval of documents, pre-processing of documents, natural language processing, methods for text clustering, and methods for text classification are described in detail. Text mining techniques can facilitate the mining of vast amounts of knowledge on a given topic from published biomedical research articles and draw meaningful conclusions that are not possible otherwise.

Classification of time series patterns from complex dynamic systems

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Schryver, J.C.; Rao, N.

1998-07-01

An increasing availability of high-performance computing and data storage media at decreasing cost is making possible the proliferation of large-scale numerical databases and data warehouses. Numeric warehousing enterprises on the order of hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes are a reality in many fields such as finance, retail sales, process systems monitoring, biomedical monitoring, surveillance and transportation. Large-scale databases are becoming more accessible to larger user communities through the internet, web-based applications and database connectivity. Consequently, most researchers now have access to a variety of massive datasets. This trend will probably only continue to grow over the next several years. Unfortunately, the availability of integrated tools to explore, analyze and understand the data warehoused in these archives is lagging far behind the ability to gain access to the same data. In particular, locating and identifying patterns of interest in numerical time series data is an increasingly important problem for which there are few available techniques. Temporal pattern recognition poses many interesting problems in classification, segmentation, prediction, diagnosis and anomaly detection. This research focuses on the problem of classification or characterization of numerical time series data. Highway vehicles and their drivers are examples of complex dynamic systems (CDS) which are being used by transportation agencies for field testing to generate large-scale time series datasets. Tools for effective analysis of numerical time series in databases generated by highway vehicle systems are not yet available, or have not been adapted to the target problem domain. However, analysis tools from similar domains may be adapted to the problem of classification of numerical time series data.

An RFID-Based Closed-Loop Wireless Power Transmission System for Biomedical Applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Kiani, Mehdi; Ghovanloo, Maysam

2010-04-01

This brief presents a standalone closed-loop wireless power transmission system that is built around a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) radio-frequency identification (RFID) reader (TRF7960) operating at 13.56 MHz. It can be used for inductively powering implantable biomedical devices in a closed loop. Any changes in the distance and misalignment between transmitter and receiver coils in near-field wireless power transmission can cause a significant change in the received power, which can cause either a malfunction or excessive heat dissipation. RFID circuits are often used in an open loop. However, their back telemetry capability can be utilized to stabilize the received voltage on the implant. Our measurements showed that the delivered power to the transponder was maintained at 11.2 mW over a range of 0.5 to 2 cm, while the transmitter power consumption changed from 78 mW to 1.1 W. The closed-loop system can also oppose voltage variations as a result of sudden changes in the load current.

Prioritising lexical patterns to increase axiomatisation in biomedical ontologies. The role of localisation and modularity.

Science.gov (United States)

Quesada-Martínez, M; Fernández-Breis, J T; Stevens, R; Mikroyannidi, E

2015-01-01

This article is part of the Focus Theme of METHODS of Information in Medicine on "Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems". In previous work, we have defined methods for the extraction of lexical patterns from labels as an initial step towards semi-automatic ontology enrichment methods. Our previous findings revealed that many biomedical ontologies could benefit from enrichment methods using lexical patterns as a starting point.Here, we aim to identify which lexical patterns are appropriate for ontology enrichment, driving its analysis by metrics to prioritised the patterns. We propose metrics for suggesting which lexical regularities should be the starting point to enrich complex ontologies. Our method determines the relevance of a lexical pattern by measuring its locality in the ontology, that is, the distance between the classes associated with the pattern, and the distribution of the pattern in a certain module of the ontology. The methods have been applied to four significant biomedical ontologies including the Gene Ontology and SNOMED CT. The metrics provide information about the engineering of the ontologies and the relevance of the patterns. Our method enables the suggestion of links between classes that are not made explicit in the ontology. We propose a prioritisation of the lexical patterns found in the analysed ontologies. The locality and distribution of lexical patterns offer insights into the further engineering of the ontology. Developers can use this information to improve the axiomatisation of their ontologies.

Biomedical applications of nano-titania in theranostics and photodynamic therapy.

Science.gov (United States)

Rehman, F U; Zhao, C; Jiang, H; Wang, X

2016-01-01

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is one of the most abundantly used nanomaterials for human life. It is used in sunscreen, photovoltaic devices, biomedical applications and as a food additive and environmental scavenger. Nano-TiO2 in biomedical applications is well documented. It is used in endoprosthetic implants and early theranostics of neoplastic and non-neoplastic maladies as a photodynamic therapeutic agent and as vehicles in nano-drug delivery systems. Herein, we focus on the recent advancements and applications of nano-TiO2 in bio-nanotechnology, nanomedicine and photodynamic therapy (PDT).

Special Issue: 3D Printing for Biomedical Engineering

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chee Kai Chua

2017-02-01

Full Text Available Three-dimensional (3D printing has a long history of applications in biomedical engineering. The development and expansion of traditional biomedical applications are being advanced and enriched by new printing technologies. New biomedical applications such as bioprinting are highly attractive and trendy. This Special Issue aims to provide readers with a glimpse of the recent profile of 3D printing in biomedical research.

Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering in Clinical Environment and Legal Surrounding

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Medvedec, M.

2013-01-01

An application of radiation in medicine is essentially associated with medical physics and biomedical engineering. The purpose of this study is to analyze the perception and the status of clinical medical physicists and biomedical engineers within the current international and Croatian legal framework. The International Labour Organization (ILO) in its International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-08) notes that medical physicists and biomedical engineers are an integral part of the health workforce, alongside those occupations classified as health professionals. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its basic safety standards for radiation protection and safety of radiation sources also defines medical physicists as health professional. The World Health Organization (WHO) urges member states to include biomedical engineers in assessment, planning, procurement, implementation and management of health technologies, in particular biomedical devices. The Council of the European Union (EU) in its directives defines qualified professionals, especially experts in medical physics, as workers who carry out physical, technical and radiochemical work in regard to dosimetry, radiation protection, quality assurance and quality control, equipment management, etc. According to the U.S. Office of Labor Statistics, biomedical engineer is an occupation with the third-fastest growth rate in the economy, as projected for the period 2010-2020. It is expected that the role and the importance of medical physics and biomedical engineering profession in Croatia, a member state of ILO, WHO, IAEA and EU, will be soon fully regulated in a way comparable to the career paths of other health professionals within a clinical environment, primarily for the benefit of patients and hospital staff, healthcare facilities and healthcare system in general.(author)

Fourth International Conference on Complex Systems

CERN Document Server

Minai, Ali A; Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IV

2008-01-01

In June of 2002, over 500 professors, students and researchers met in Boston, Massachusetts for the Fourth International Conference on Complex Systems. The attendees represented a remarkably diverse collection of fields: biology, ecology, physics, engineering, computer science, economics, psychology and sociology, The goal of the conference was to encourage cross-fertilization between the many disciplines represented and to deepen understanding of the properties common to all complex systems. This volume contains 43 papers selected from the more than 200 presented at the conference. Topics include: cellular automata, neurology, evolution, computer science, network dynamics, and urban planning. About NECSI: For over 10 years, The New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) has been instrumental in the development of complex systems science and its applications. NECSI conducts research, education, knowledge dissemination, and community development around the world for the promotion of the study of complex sys...

Modeling and Optimization of Class-E Amplifier at Subnominal Condition in a Wireless Power Transfer System for Biomedical Implants.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Hao; Shao, Qi; Fang, Xuelin

2017-02-01

For the class-E amplifier in a wireless power transfer (WPT) system, the design parameters are always determined by the nominal model. However, this model neglects the conduction loss and voltage stress of MOSFET and cannot guarantee the highest efficiency in the WPT system for biomedical implants. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel circuit model of the subnominal class-E amplifier. On a WPT platform for capsule endoscope, the proposed model was validated to be effective and the relationship between the amplifier's design parameters and its characteristics was analyzed. At a given duty ratio, the design parameters with the highest efficiency and safe voltage stress are derived and the condition is called 'optimal subnominal condition.' The amplifier's efficiency can reach the highest of 99.3% at the 0.097 duty ratio. Furthermore, at the 0.5 duty ratio, the measured efficiency of the optimal subnominal condition can reach 90.8%, which is 15.2% higher than that of the nominal condition. Then, a WPT experiment with a receiving unit was carried out to validate the feasibility of the optimized amplifier. In general, the design parameters of class-E amplifier in a WPT system for biomedical implants can be determined with the proposed optimization method in this paper.

Superparamagnetic nanoparticles for biomedical applications: Possibilities and limitations of a new drug delivery system

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Neuberger, Tobias [Musculoskeletal Research Unit, Equine Hospital, Vetsuisse Faculty Zurich, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstr. 260, 8057 Zurich (Switzerland); Schoepf, Bernhard [Musculoskeletal Research Unit, Equine Hospital, Vetsuisse Faculty Zurich, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstr. 260, 8057 Zurich (Switzerland); Hofmann, Heinrich [Laboratory of Powder Technology, Institute of Materials, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne (Switzerland); Hofmann, Margarete [MatSearch Pully, Chemin Jean Pavillard, 14, CH-1009 Pully (Switzerland); Rechenberg, Brigitte von [Musculoskeletal Research Unit, Equine Hospital, Vetsuisse Faculty Zurich, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstr. 260, 8057 Zurich (Switzerland)]. E-mail: bvonrechenberg@vetclinics.unizh.ch

2005-05-15

Nanoparticles can be used in biomedical applications, where they facilitate laboratory diagnostics, or in medical drug targeting. They are used for in vivo applications such as contrast agent for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), for tumor therapy or cardiovascular disease. Very promising nanoparticles for these applications are superparamagnetic nanoparticles based on a core consisting of iron oxides (SPION) that can be targeted through external magnets. SPION are coated with biocompatible materials and can be functionalized with drugs, proteins or plasmids. In this review, the characteristics and applications of SPION in the biomedical sector are introduced and discussed.

Superparamagnetic nanoparticles for biomedical applications: Possibilities and limitations of a new drug delivery system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Neuberger, Tobias; Schoepf, Bernhard; Hofmann, Heinrich; Hofmann, Margarete; Rechenberg, Brigitte von

2005-01-01

Nanoparticles can be used in biomedical applications, where they facilitate laboratory diagnostics, or in medical drug targeting. They are used for in vivo applications such as contrast agent for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), for tumor therapy or cardiovascular disease. Very promising nanoparticles for these applications are superparamagnetic nanoparticles based on a core consisting of iron oxides (SPION) that can be targeted through external magnets. SPION are coated with biocompatible materials and can be functionalized with drugs, proteins or plasmids. In this review, the characteristics and applications of SPION in the biomedical sector are introduced and discussed

Research evaluation support services in biomedical libraries

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karen Elizabeth Gutzman

2018-01-01

Conclusions: Libraries can leverage a variety of evaluation support services as an opportunity to successfully meet an array of challenges confronting the biomedical research community, including robust efforts to report and demonstrate tangible and meaningful outcomes of biomedical research and clinical care. These services represent a transformative direction that can be emulated by other biomedical and research libraries.

Biomedical nanomaterials from design to implementation

CERN Document Server

Webster, Thomas

2016-01-01

Biomedical Nanomaterials brings together the engineering applications and challenges of using nanostructured surfaces and nanomaterials in healthcare in a single source. Each chapter covers important and new information in the biomedical applications of nanomaterials.

Consideration for solar system exploration - A system to Mars. [biomedical, environmental, and psychological factors

Science.gov (United States)

Nicogossian, Arnauld E.; Garshnek, Victoria

1989-01-01

Biomedical issues related to a manned mission to Mars are reviewed. Consideration is given to cardiovascular deconditioning, hematological and immunological changes, bone and muscle changes, nutritional issues, and the development of physiological countermeasures. Environmental issues are discussed, including radiation hazards, toxic chemical exposure, and the cabin environment. Also, human factors, performance and behavior, medical screening of the crew, disease prediction, and health maintenance are examined.

Recombinant production of plant lectins in microbial systems for biomedical application – the frutalin case study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Carla eOliveira

2014-08-01

Full Text Available Frutalin is a homotetrameric partly-glycosylated alpha-D-galactose-binding lectin of biomedical interest from Artocarpus incisa (breadfruit seeds, belonging to the jacalin-related lectins family. As other plant lectins, frutalin is a heterogeneous mixture of several isoforms possibly with distinct biological activities. The main problem of using such lectins as biomedical tools is that batch-to-batch variation in isoforms content may lead to inconstant results. The production of lectins by recombinant means has the advantage of obtaining high amounts of proteins with defined amino-acid sequences and more precise properties. In this mini review, we provide the strategies followed to produce two different forms of frutalin in two different microbial systems: Escherichia coli and Pichia pastoris. The processing and functional properties of the recombinant frutalin obtained from these hosts are compared to those of frutalin extracted from breadfruit. Emphasis is given particularly to recombinant frutalin produced in P. pastoris, which showed a remarkable capacity as biomarker of human prostate cancer and as apoptosis-inducer of cancer cells. Recombinant frutalin production opens perspectives for its development as a new tool in human medicine.

Recombinant production of plant lectins in microbial systems for biomedical application – the frutalin case study

Science.gov (United States)

Oliveira, Carla; Teixeira, José A.; Domingues, Lucília

2014-01-01

Frutalin is a homotetrameric partly glycosylated α-D-galactose-binding lectin of biomedical interest from Artocarpus incisa (breadfruit) seeds, belonging to the jacalin-related lectins family. As other plant lectins, frutalin is a heterogeneous mixture of several isoforms possibly with distinct biological activities. The main problem of using such lectins as biomedical tools is that “batch-to-batch” variation in isoforms content may lead to inconstant results. The production of lectins by recombinant means has the advantage of obtaining high amounts of proteins with defined amino-acid sequences and more precise properties. In this mini review, we provide the strategies followed to produce two different forms of frutalin in two different microbial systems: Escherichia coli and Pichia pastoris. The processing and functional properties of the recombinant frutalin obtained from these hosts are compared to those of frutalin extracted from breadfruit. Emphasis is given particularly to recombinant frutalin produced in P. pastoris, which showed a remarkable capacity as biomarker of human prostate cancer and as apoptosis-inducer of cancer cells. Recombinant frutalin production opens perspectives for its development as a new tool in human medicine. PMID:25152749

Biomedical support of man in space

Science.gov (United States)

Pendergast, D. R.; Olszowka, A. J.; Rokitka, M. A.; Farhi, L. E.

In its broadest sense, biomedical support of man in space must not be limited to assisting spacecraft crew during the mission; such support should also ensure that flight personnel be able to perform properly during landing and after leaving the craft. Man has developed mechanisms that allow him to cope with specific stresses in his normal habitat; there is indisputable evidence that, in some cases, the space environment, by relieving these stresses, has also allowed the adaptive mechanisms to lapse, causing serious problems after re-entry. Inflight biomedical support must therefore include means to simulate some of the normal stresses of the Earth environment. In the area of cardiovascular performance, we have come to rely heavily on complex feedback mechanisms to cope with two stresses, often combined: postural changes, which alter the body axis along which gravitational acceleration acts, and physical exercise, which increases the total load on the system. Unless the appropriate responses are reinforced continuously during flight, crew members may be incapacitated upon return. The first step in the support process must be a study of the way in which changes in g, even of short duration, affect these responses. In particular we should learn more about effects of g on the "on" and "off" dynamics, using a variety of approaches: increased acceleration on one hand at recumbency, immersion, lower body positive pressure, and other means of simulating some of the effects of low g, on the other. Once we understand this, we will have to determine the minimal exposure dose required to maintain the response mechanisms. Finally, we shall have to design stresses that simulate Earth environment and can be imposed in the space vehicle. Some of the information is already at hand; we know that several aspects of the response to exercise are affected by posture. Results from a current series of studies on the kinetics of tilt and on the dynamics of readjustment to exercise in

The role of biomedical knowledge in echocardiographic interpretation expertise development: a correlation study

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Dorte Guldbrand; Gøtzsche, Ole; Eika, Berit

2010-01-01

Purpose: Little is known about factors of relevance for achieving knowledge of echocardiography (TTE); one of the essential skills defined by the European Society of Cardiology Core Curriculum. Recent research in other fields suggests that biomedical knowledge plays a more prominent role in profe......Purpose: Little is known about factors of relevance for achieving knowledge of echocardiography (TTE); one of the essential skills defined by the European Society of Cardiology Core Curriculum. Recent research in other fields suggests that biomedical knowledge plays a more prominent role...... in professional practice than previously assumed. This study investigates the role of biomedical knowledge represented by physiology knowledge in the development of echocardiographic expertise. Methods: Forty-five physicians (15 novices, 15 intermediates and 15 experts) were evaluated on echocardiography...... interpretation skills. An anatomical focused checklist was developed based on Danish Cardiology Society guidelines for a standard echocardiography of adults. A TTE case of a common and complex clinical presentation was recorded and presented to participants on a portable computer using EchoPac software...

A passage retrieval method based on probabilistic information retrieval model and UMLS concepts in biomedical question answering.

Science.gov (United States)

Sarrouti, Mourad; Ouatik El Alaoui, Said

2017-04-01

Passage retrieval, the identification of top-ranked passages that may contain the answer for a given biomedical question, is a crucial component for any biomedical question answering (QA) system. Passage retrieval in open-domain QA is a longstanding challenge widely studied over the last decades. However, it still requires further efforts in biomedical QA. In this paper, we present a new biomedical passage retrieval method based on Stanford CoreNLP sentence/passage length, probabilistic information retrieval (IR) model and UMLS concepts. In the proposed method, we first use our document retrieval system based on PubMed search engine and UMLS similarity to retrieve relevant documents to a given biomedical question. We then take the abstracts from the retrieved documents and use Stanford CoreNLP for sentence splitter to make a set of sentences, i.e., candidate passages. Using stemmed words and UMLS concepts as features for the BM25 model, we finally compute the similarity scores between the biomedical question and each of the candidate passages and keep the N top-ranked ones. Experimental evaluations performed on large standard datasets, provided by the BioASQ challenge, show that the proposed method achieves good performances compared with the current state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods by an average of 6.84% in terms of mean average precision (MAP). We have proposed an efficient passage retrieval method which can be used to retrieve relevant passages in biomedical QA systems with high mean average precision. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Biomedical technology transfer: Bioinstrumentation for cardiology, neurology, and the circulatory system

Science.gov (United States)

1976-01-01

Developments in applying aerospace medical technology to the design and production of medical equipment and instrumentation are reported. Projects described include intercranial pressure transducers, leg negative pressure devices, a synthetic speech prosthesis for victims of cerebral palsy, and a Doppler blood flow instrument. Commercialization activities for disseminating and utilizing NASA technology, and new biomedical problem areas are discussed.

For 481 biomedical open access journals, articles are not searchable in the Directory of Open Access Journals nor in conventional biomedical databases.

Science.gov (United States)

Liljekvist, Mads Svane; Andresen, Kristoffer; Pommergaard, Hans-Christian; Rosenberg, Jacob

2015-01-01

Background. Open access (OA) journals allows access to research papers free of charge to the reader. Traditionally, biomedical researchers use databases like MEDLINE and EMBASE to discover new advances. However, biomedical OA journals might not fulfill such databases' criteria, hindering dissemination. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a database exclusively listing OA journals. The aim of this study was to investigate DOAJ's coverage of biomedical OA journals compared with the conventional biomedical databases. Methods. Information on all journals listed in four conventional biomedical databases (MEDLINE, PubMed Central, EMBASE and SCOPUS) and DOAJ were gathered. Journals were included if they were (1) actively publishing, (2) full OA, (3) prospectively indexed in one or more database, and (4) of biomedical subject. Impact factor and journal language were also collected. DOAJ was compared with conventional databases regarding the proportion of journals covered, along with their impact factor and publishing language. The proportion of journals with articles indexed by DOAJ was determined. Results. In total, 3,236 biomedical OA journals were included in the study. Of the included journals, 86.7% were listed in DOAJ. Combined, the conventional biomedical databases listed 75.0% of the journals; 18.7% in MEDLINE; 36.5% in PubMed Central; 51.5% in SCOPUS and 50.6% in EMBASE. Of the journals in DOAJ, 88.7% published in English and 20.6% had received impact factor for 2012 compared with 93.5% and 26.0%, respectively, for journals in the conventional biomedical databases. A subset of 51.1% and 48.5% of the journals in DOAJ had articles indexed from 2012 and 2013, respectively. Of journals exclusively listed in DOAJ, one journal had received an impact factor for 2012, and 59.6% of the journals had no content from 2013 indexed in DOAJ. Conclusions. DOAJ is the most complete registry of biomedical OA journals compared with five conventional biomedical databases

Learning through projects in the training of biomedical engineers: an application experience

Science.gov (United States)

Gambi, José Antonio Li; Peme, Carmen

2011-09-01

Learning through Projects in the curriculum consists of both the identification and analysis of a problem, and the design of solution, execution and evaluation strategies, with teams of students. The project is conceived as the creation of a set of strategies articulated and developed during a certain amount of time to solve a problem contextualized in situations continually changing, where the constant evaluation provides feedback to make adjustments. In 2009, Learning through Projects was applied on the subject Hospital Facilities and three intervention projects were developed in health centers. This first stage is restricted to the analysis of the aspects that are considered to be basic to the professional training: a) Context knowledge: The future biomedical engineers must be familiarized with the complex health system where they will develop their profession; b) Team work: This is one of the essential skills in the training of students, since Biomedical Engineering connects the knowledge of sciences of life with the knowledge of exact sciences and technology; c) Regulations: The activities related to the profession require the implementation of regulations; therefore, to be aware of and to apply these regulations is a fundamental aspect to be analyzed in this stage; d) Project evaluation: It refers to the elaboration and studying of co-evaluation reports, which helps to find out if Learning through Projects contributes to the training. This new line of investigation has the purpose of discovering if the application of this learning strategy makes changes in the training of students in relation to their future professional career. The findings of this ongoing investigation will allow for the analysis of the possibility of extending its application. Key words: engineering, biomedical, learning, projects, strategies.

ICNBME-2011: International Conference on Nanotechnologies and Biomedical Engineering; German-Moldovan Workshop on Novel Nanomaterials for Electronic, Photonic and Biomedical Applications. Proceedings

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Tiginyanu, Ion; Sontea, Victor

2011-01-01

This book includes articles which cover a vast range of subjects, such as: nano technologies and nano materials, micro- and nano-objects, nanostructured and highly integrated systems, biophysics, biomedical instrumentation and devices, biomaterials, medical imaging, information technologies for health care, tele medicine, etc.

Proof of concept: concept-based biomedical information retrieval

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend

2010-01-01

In this thesis we investigate the possibility to integrate domain-specific knowledge into biomedical information retrieval (IR). Recent decades have shown a fast growing interest in biomedical research, reflected by an exponential growth in scientific literature. An important problem for biomedical

Sortal anaphora resolution to enhance relation extraction from biomedical literature.

Science.gov (United States)

Kilicoglu, Halil; Rosemblat, Graciela; Fiszman, Marcelo; Rindflesch, Thomas C

2016-04-14

Entity coreference is common in biomedical literature and it can affect text understanding systems that rely on accurate identification of named entities, such as relation extraction and automatic summarization. Coreference resolution is a foundational yet challenging natural language processing task which, if performed successfully, is likely to enhance such systems significantly. In this paper, we propose a semantically oriented, rule-based method to resolve sortal anaphora, a specific type of coreference that forms the majority of coreference instances in biomedical literature. The method addresses all entity types and relies on linguistic components of SemRep, a broad-coverage biomedical relation extraction system. It has been incorporated into SemRep, extending its core semantic interpretation capability from sentence level to discourse level. We evaluated our sortal anaphora resolution method in several ways. The first evaluation specifically focused on sortal anaphora relations. Our methodology achieved a F1 score of 59.6 on the test portion of a manually annotated corpus of 320 Medline abstracts, a 4-fold improvement over the baseline method. Investigating the impact of sortal anaphora resolution on relation extraction, we found that the overall effect was positive, with 50 % of the changes involving uninformative relations being replaced by more specific and informative ones, while 35 % of the changes had no effect, and only 15 % were negative. We estimate that anaphora resolution results in changes in about 1.5 % of approximately 82 million semantic relations extracted from the entire PubMed. Our results demonstrate that a heavily semantic approach to sortal anaphora resolution is largely effective for biomedical literature. Our evaluation and error analysis highlight some areas for further improvements, such as coordination processing and intra-sentential antecedent selection.

Physical approach to complex systems

Science.gov (United States)

Kwapień, Jarosław; Drożdż, Stanisław

2012-06-01

Typically, complex systems are natural or social systems which consist of a large number of nonlinearly interacting elements. These systems are open, they interchange information or mass with environment and constantly modify their internal structure and patterns of activity in the process of self-organization. As a result, they are flexible and easily adapt to variable external conditions. However, the most striking property of such systems is the existence of emergent phenomena which cannot be simply derived or predicted solely from the knowledge of the systems’ structure and the interactions among their individual elements. This property points to the holistic approaches which require giving parallel descriptions of the same system on different levels of its organization. There is strong evidence-consolidated also in the present review-that different, even apparently disparate complex systems can have astonishingly similar characteristics both in their structure and in their behaviour. One can thus expect the existence of some common, universal laws that govern their properties. Physics methodology proves helpful in addressing many of the related issues. In this review, we advocate some of the computational methods which in our opinion are especially fruitful in extracting information on selected-but at the same time most representative-complex systems like human brain, financial markets and natural language, from the time series representing the observables associated with these systems. The properties we focus on comprise the collective effects and their coexistence with noise, long-range interactions, the interplay between determinism and flexibility in evolution, scale invariance, criticality, multifractality and hierarchical structure. The methods described either originate from “hard” physics-like the random matrix theory-and then were transmitted to other fields of science via the field of complex systems research, or they originated elsewhere but

Applications of carbon nanotubes-based biomaterials in biomedical nanotechnology.

Science.gov (United States)

Polizu, Stefania; Savadogo, Oumarou; Poulin, Philippe; Yahia, L'Hocine

2006-07-01

One of the facets of nanotechnology applications is the immense opportunities they offer for new developments in medicine and health sciences. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have particularly attracted attention for designing new monitoring systems for environment and living cells as well as nanosensors. Carbon nanotubes-based biomaterials are also employed as support for active prosthesis or functional matrices in reparation of parts of the human body. These nanostructures are studied as molecular-level building blocks for the complex and miniaturized medical device, and substrate for stimulation of cellular growth. The CNTs are cylindrical shaped with caged molecules which can act as nanoscale containers for molecular species, well required for biomolecular recognition and drug delivery systems. Endowed with very large aspect ratios, an excellent electrical conductivity and inertness along with mechanical robustness, nanotubes found enormous applications in molecular electronics and bioelectronics. The ballistic electrical behaviour of SWNTs conjugated with functionalization promotes a large variety of biosensors for individual molecules. Actuative response of CNTs is considered very promising feature for nanodevices, micro-robots and artificial muscles. An description of CNTs based biomaterials is attempted in this review, in order to point out their enormous potential for biomedical nanotechnology and nanobiotechnology.

Handbook of photonics for biomedical engineering

CERN Document Server

Kim, Donghyun; Somekh, Michael

2017-01-01

Nanophotonics has emerged rapidly into technological mainstream with the advent and maturity of nanotechnology available in photonics and enabled many new exciting applications in the area of biomedical science and engineering that were unimagined even a few years ago with conventional photonic engineering techniques. Handbook of Nanophotonics in Biomedical Engineering is intended to be a reliable resource to a wealth of information on nanophotonics that can inspire readers by detailing emerging and established possibilities of nanophotonics in biomedical science and engineering applications. This comprehensive reference presents not only the basics of nanophotonics but also explores recent experimental and clinical methods used in biomedical and bioengineering research. Each peer-reviewed chapter of this book discusses fundamental aspects and materials/fabrication issues of nanophotonics, as well as applications in interfaces, cell, tissue, animal studies, and clinical engineering. The organization provides ...

What Is a Complex Innovation System?

Science.gov (United States)

Katz, J. Sylvan

2016-01-01

Innovation systems are sometimes referred to as complex systems, something that is intuitively understood but poorly defined. A complex system dynamically evolves in non-linear ways giving it unique properties that distinguish it from other systems. In particular, a common signature of complex systems is scale-invariant emergent properties. A scale-invariant property can be identified because it is solely described by a power law function, f(x) = kxα, where the exponent, α, is a measure of scale-invariance. The focus of this paper is to describe and illustrate that innovation systems have properties of a complex adaptive system. In particular scale-invariant emergent properties indicative of their complex nature that can be quantified and used to inform public policy. The global research system is an example of an innovation system. Peer-reviewed publications containing knowledge are a characteristic output. Citations or references to these articles are an indirect measure of the impact the knowledge has on the research community. Peer-reviewed papers indexed in Scopus and in the Web of Science were used as data sources to produce measures of sizes and impact. These measures are used to illustrate how scale-invariant properties can be identified and quantified. It is demonstrated that the distribution of impact has a reasonable likelihood of being scale-invariant with scaling exponents that tended toward a value of less than 3.0 with the passage of time and decreasing group sizes. Scale-invariant correlations are shown between the evolution of impact and size with time and between field impact and sizes at points in time. The recursive or self-similar nature of scale-invariance suggests that any smaller innovation system within the global research system is likely to be complex with scale-invariant properties too. PMID:27258040

What Is a Complex Innovation System?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

J Sylvan Katz

Full Text Available Innovation systems are sometimes referred to as complex systems, something that is intuitively understood but poorly defined. A complex system dynamically evolves in non-linear ways giving it unique properties that distinguish it from other systems. In particular, a common signature of complex systems is scale-invariant emergent properties. A scale-invariant property can be identified because it is solely described by a power law function, f(x = kxα, where the exponent, α, is a measure of scale-invariance. The focus of this paper is to describe and illustrate that innovation systems have properties of a complex adaptive system. In particular scale-invariant emergent properties indicative of their complex nature that can be quantified and used to inform public policy. The global research system is an example of an innovation system. Peer-reviewed publications containing knowledge are a characteristic output. Citations or references to these articles are an indirect measure of the impact the knowledge has on the research community. Peer-reviewed papers indexed in Scopus and in the Web of Science were used as data sources to produce measures of sizes and impact. These measures are used to illustrate how scale-invariant properties can be identified and quantified. It is demonstrated that the distribution of impact has a reasonable likelihood of being scale-invariant with scaling exponents that tended toward a value of less than 3.0 with the passage of time and decreasing group sizes. Scale-invariant correlations are shown between the evolution of impact and size with time and between field impact and sizes at points in time. The recursive or self-similar nature of scale-invariance suggests that any smaller innovation system within the global research system is likely to be complex with scale-invariant properties too.

Enhancing biomedical design with design thinking.

Science.gov (United States)

Kemnitzer, Ronald; Dorsa, Ed

2009-01-01

The development of biomedical equipment is justifiably focused on making products that "work." However, this approach leaves many of the people affected by these designs (operators, patients, etc.) with little or no representation when it comes to the design of these products. Industrial design is a "user focused" profession which takes into account the needs of diverse groups when making design decisions. The authors propose that biomedical equipment design can be enhanced, made more user and patient "friendly" by adopting the industrial design approach to researching, analyzing, and ultimately designing biomedical products.

Application of an efficient Bayesian discretization method to biomedical data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gopalakrishnan Vanathi

2011-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Several data mining methods require data that are discrete, and other methods often perform better with discrete data. We introduce an efficient Bayesian discretization (EBD method for optimal discretization of variables that runs efficiently on high-dimensional biomedical datasets. The EBD method consists of two components, namely, a Bayesian score to evaluate discretizations and a dynamic programming search procedure to efficiently search the space of possible discretizations. We compared the performance of EBD to Fayyad and Irani's (FI discretization method, which is commonly used for discretization. Results On 24 biomedical datasets obtained from high-throughput transcriptomic and proteomic studies, the classification performances of the C4.5 classifier and the naïve Bayes classifier were statistically significantly better when the predictor variables were discretized using EBD over FI. EBD was statistically significantly more stable to the variability of the datasets than FI. However, EBD was less robust, though not statistically significantly so, than FI and produced slightly more complex discretizations than FI. Conclusions On a range of biomedical datasets, a Bayesian discretization method (EBD yielded better classification performance and stability but was less robust than the widely used FI discretization method. The EBD discretization method is easy to implement, permits the incorporation of prior knowledge and belief, and is sufficiently fast for application to high-dimensional data.

The development of biomedical engineering as experienced by one biomedical engineer.

Science.gov (United States)

Newell, Jonathan C

2012-12-12

This personal essay described the development of the field of Biomedical Engineering from its early days, from the perspective of one who lived through that development. It describes the making of a major invention using data that had been rejected by other scientists, the re-discovery of an obscure fact of physiology and its use in developing a major medical instrument, the development of a new medical imaging modality, and the near-death rescue of a research project. The essay concludes with comments about the development and present status of impedance imaging, and recent changes in the evolution of biomedical engineering as a field.

Biomedical Research Institute, Biomedical Research Foundation of Northwest Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1992-01-01

Department of Energy (DOE) has prepared an Environmental Assessment (EA), DOE/EA-0789, evaluating the environmental impacts of construction and operation of a Biomedical Research Institute (BRI) at the Louisiana State University (LSU) Medical Center, Shreveport, Louisiana. The purpose of the BRI is to accelerate the development of biomedical research in cardiovascular disease, molecular biology, and neurobiology. Based on the analyses in the EA, DOE has determined that the proposed action does not constitute a major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment within the meaning of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). Therefore, the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement is not required

Synchronization and emergence in complex systems

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

... complex systems. Fatihcan M Atay. Synchronization, Coupled Systems and Networks Volume 77 Issue 5 November 2011 pp 855-863 ... We show how novel behaviour can emerge in complex systems at the global level through synchronization of the activities of their constituent units. Two mechanisms are suggested for ...

Infinite Particle Systems: Complex Systems III

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Editorial Board

2008-06-01

Full Text Available In the years 2002-2005, a group of German and Polish mathematicians worked under a DFG research project No 436 POL 113/98/0-1 entitled "Methods of stochastic analysis in the theory of collective phenomena: Gibbs states and statistical hydrodynamics". The results of their study were summarized at the German-Polish conference, which took place in Poland in October 2005. The venue of the conference was Kazimierz Dolny upon Vistula - a lovely town and a popular place for various cultural, scientific, and even political events of an international significance. The conference was also attended by scientists from France, Italy, Portugal, UK, Ukraine, and USA, which predetermined its international character. Since that time, the conference, entitled "Infinite Particle Systems: Complex Systems" has become an annual international event, attended by leading scientists from Germany, Poland and many other countries. The present volume of the "Condensed Matter Physics" contains proceedings of the conference "Infinite Particle Systems: Complex Systems III", which took place in June 2007.

Sierra Leone Journal of Biomedical Research

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The Sierra Leone Journal of Biomedical Research publishes papers in all fields of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences including Basic Medical Sciences, Clinical Sciences, Dental Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Biology, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Biotechnology in relation to Medicine, ...

From System Complexity to Emergent Properties

CERN Document Server

Aziz-Alaoui, M. A

2009-01-01

Emergence and complexity refer to the appearance of higher-level properties and behaviours of a system that obviously comes from the collective dynamics of that system's components. These properties are not directly deductable from the lower-level motion of that system. Emergent properties are properties of the "whole'' that are not possessed by any of the individual parts making up that whole. Such phenomena exist in various domains and can be described, using complexity concepts and thematic knowledges. This book highlights complexity modelling through dynamical or behavioral systems. The pluridisciplinary purposes, developped along the chapters, are enable to design links between a wide-range of fundamental and applicative Sciences. Developing such links - instead of focusing on specific and narrow researches - is characteristic of the Science of Complexity that we try to promote by this contribution.

Complex Systems Design & Management : Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Complex Systems Design & Management

CERN Document Server

Caseau, Yves; Krob, Daniel; Rauzy, Antoine

2013-01-01

This book contains all refereed papers that were accepted to the third edition of the « Complex Systems Design & Management » (CSD&M 2012) international conference that took place in Paris (France) from December 12-14, 2012. (Website: http://www.csdm2012.csdm.fr)  These proceedings cover the most recent trends in the emerging field of complex systems sciences & practices from an industrial and academic perspective, including the main industrial domains (transport, defense & security, electronics, energy & environment, e-services), scientific & technical topics (systems fundamentals, systems architecture& engineering, systems metrics & quality, systemic  tools) and system types (transportation systems, embedded systems, software & information systems, systems of systems, artificial ecosystems). The CSD&M 2012 conference is organized under the guidance of the CESAMES non-profit organization (http://www.cesames.net).

Biomedical Applications of Thermally Activated Shape Memory Polymers

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Small IV, W; Singhal, P; Wilson, T S; Maitland, D J

2009-04-10

Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are smart materials that can remember a primary shape and can return to this primary shape from a deformed secondary shape when given an appropriate stimulus. This property allows them to be delivered in a compact form via minimally invasive surgeries in humans, and deployed to achieve complex final shapes. Here we review the various biomedical applications of SMPs and the challenges they face with respect to actuation and biocompatibility. While shape memory behavior has been demonstrated with heat, light and chemical environment, here we focus our discussion on thermally stimulated SMPs.

The Meaning of System: Towards a Complexity Orientation in Systems Thinking

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Leleur, Steen

2014-01-01

for systems practice. It is argued that complexity theory and thinking with reference to Luhmann a.o. ought to be recognised and paid attention to by the systems community. Overall, it is found that a complexity orientation may contribute to extend and enrich the explanatory power of current systems theory......This article reviews the generic meaning of ‘system’ and complements more conventional system notions with a system perception based on recent complexity theory. With system as the core concept of systems theory, its actual meaning is not just of theoretical interest but is highly relevant also...... when used to complex real-world problems. As regards systems practice it is found that selective use and combination of five presented research approaches (functionalist, interpretive, emancipatory, postmodern and complexity) which function as different but complementing ‘epistemic lenses’ in a process...

An overview on characterization, utilization and leachate analysis of biomedical waste incinerator ash.

Science.gov (United States)

Rajor, Anita; Xaxa, Monika; Mehta, Ratika; Kunal

2012-10-15

Solid waste management is one of the major global environmental issues, as there is continuous increase in industrial globalization and generation of waste. Solid wastes encompass the heterogeneous mass of throwaways from the urban community as well as the homogeneous accumulations of agricultural, industrial and mineral wastes. Biomedical waste pose a significant impact on health and environment. A proper waste management system should be required to dispose hazardous biomedical waste and incineration should be the best available technology to reduce the volume of this hazardous waste. The incineration process destroys pathogens and reduces the waste volume and weight but leaves a solid material called biomedical waste ash as residue which increases the levels of heavy metals, inorganic salts and organic compounds in the environment. Disposal of biomedical waste ash in landfill may cause contamination of groundwater as metals are not destroyed during incineration. The limited space and the high cost for land disposal led to the development of recycling technologies and the reuse of ash in different systems. In order to minimize leaching of its hazardous components into the environment several studies confirmed the successful utilization of biomedical waste ash in agriculture and construction sector. This paper presents the overview on the beneficial use of ash in agriculture and construction materials and its leachate characteristics. This review also stressed on the need to further evaluate the leachate studies of the ashes and slag for their proper disposal and utilization. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications.

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, K A

1994-09-01

On August 3, 1968, the Joint Resolution of the Congress established the program and construction of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. The facility dedicated in 1980 contains the latest in computer and communications technologies. The history, program requirements, construction management, and general planning are discussed including technical issues regarding cabling, systems functions, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system (HVAC), fire suppression, research and development laboratories, among others.

SATORI: a system for ontology-guided visual exploration of biomedical data repositories.

Science.gov (United States)

Lekschas, Fritz; Gehlenborg, Nils

2018-04-01

The ever-increasing number of biomedical datasets provides tremendous opportunities for re-use but current data repositories provide limited means of exploration apart from text-based search. Ontological metadata annotations provide context by semantically relating datasets. Visualizing this rich network of relationships can improve the explorability of large data repositories and help researchers find datasets of interest. We developed SATORI-an integrative search and visual exploration interface for the exploration of biomedical data repositories. The design is informed by a requirements analysis through a series of semi-structured interviews. We evaluated the implementation of SATORI in a field study on a real-world data collection. SATORI enables researchers to seamlessly search, browse and semantically query data repositories via two visualizations that are highly interconnected with a powerful search interface. SATORI is an open-source web application, which is freely available at http://satori.refinery-platform.org and integrated into the Refinery Platform. nils@hms.harvard.edu. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Automatically classifying sentences in full-text biomedical articles into Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion.

Science.gov (United States)

Agarwal, Shashank; Yu, Hong

2009-12-01

Biomedical texts can be typically represented by four rhetorical categories: Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion (IMRAD). Classifying sentences into these categories can benefit many other text-mining tasks. Although many studies have applied different approaches for automatically classifying sentences in MEDLINE abstracts into the IMRAD categories, few have explored the classification of sentences that appear in full-text biomedical articles. We first evaluated whether sentences in full-text biomedical articles could be reliably annotated into the IMRAD format and then explored different approaches for automatically classifying these sentences into the IMRAD categories. Our results show an overall annotation agreement of 82.14% with a Kappa score of 0.756. The best classification system is a multinomial naïve Bayes classifier trained on manually annotated data that achieved 91.95% accuracy and an average F-score of 91.55%, which is significantly higher than baseline systems. A web version of this system is available online at-http://wood.ims.uwm.edu/full_text_classifier/.

Reviewing Manuscripts for Biomedical Journals

Science.gov (United States)

Garmel, Gus M

2010-01-01

Writing for publication is a complex task. For many professionals, producing a well-executed manuscript conveying one's research, ideas, or educational wisdom is challenging. Authors have varying emotions related to the process of writing for scientific publication. Although not studied, a relationship between an author's enjoyment of the writing process and the product's outcome is highly likely. As with any skill, practice generally results in improvements. Literature focused on preparing manuscripts for publication and the art of reviewing submissions exists. Most journals guard their reviewers' anonymity with respect to the manuscript review process. This is meant to protect them from direct or indirect author demands, which may occur during the review process or in the future. It is generally accepted that author identities are masked in the peer-review process. However, the concept of anonymity for reviewers has been debated recently; many editors consider it problematic that reviewers are not held accountable to the public for their decisions. The review process is often arduous and underappreciated, one reason why biomedical journals acknowledge editors and frequently recognize reviewers who donate their time and expertise in the name of science. This article describes essential elements of a submitted manuscript, with the hopes of improving scientific writing. It also discusses the review process within the biomedical literature, the importance of reviewers to the scientific process, responsibilities of reviewers, and qualities of a good review and reviewer. In addition, it includes useful insights to individuals who read and interpret the medical literature. PMID:20740129

Are figure legends sufficient? Evaluating the contribution of associated text to biomedical figure comprehension.

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Hong; Agarwal, Shashank; Johnston, Mark; Cohen, Aaron

2009-01-06

Biomedical scientists need to access figures to validate research facts and to formulate or to test novel research hypotheses. However, figures are difficult to comprehend without associated text (e.g., figure legend and other reference text). We are developing automated systems to extract the relevant explanatory information along with figures extracted from full text articles. Such systems could be very useful in improving figure retrieval and in reducing the workload of biomedical scientists, who otherwise have to retrieve and read the entire full-text journal article to determine which figures are relevant to their research. As a crucial step, we studied the importance of associated text in biomedical figure comprehension. Twenty subjects evaluated three figure-text combinations: figure+legend, figure+legend+title+abstract, and figure+full-text. Using a Likert scale, each subject scored each figure+text according to the extent to which the subject thought he/she understood the meaning of the figure and the confidence in providing the assigned score. Additionally, each subject entered a free text summary for each figure-text. We identified missing information using indicator words present within the text summaries. Both the Likert scores and the missing information were statistically analyzed for differences among the figure-text types. We also evaluated the quality of text summaries with the text-summarization evaluation method the ROUGE score. Our results showed statistically significant differences in figure comprehension when varying levels of text were provided. When the full-text article is not available, presenting just the figure+legend left biomedical researchers lacking 39-68% of the information about a figure as compared to having complete figure comprehension; adding the title and abstract improved the situation, but still left biomedical researchers missing 30% of the information. When the full-text article is available, figure comprehension

Sandpile model for relaxation in complex systems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Vazquez, A.; Sotolongo-Costa, O.; Brouers, F.

1997-10-01

The relaxation in complex systems is, in general, nonexponential. After an initial rapid decay the system relaxes slowly following a long time tail. In the present paper a sandpile moderation of the relaxation in complex systems is analysed. Complexity is introduced by a process of avalanches in the Bethe lattice and a feedback mechanism which leads to slower decay with increasing time. In this way, some features of relaxation in complex systems: long time tails relaxation, aging, and fractal distribution of characteristic times, are obtained by simple computer simulations. (author)

Relational Databases and Biomedical Big Data.

Science.gov (United States)

de Silva, N H Nisansa D

2017-01-01

In various biomedical applications that collect, handle, and manipulate data, the amounts of data tend to build up and venture into the range identified as bigdata. In such occurrences, a design decision has to be taken as to what type of database would be used to handle this data. More often than not, the default and classical solution to this in the biomedical domain according to past research is relational databases. While this used to be the norm for a long while, it is evident that there is a trend to move away from relational databases in favor of other types and paradigms of databases. However, it still has paramount importance to understand the interrelation that exists between biomedical big data and relational databases. This chapter will review the pros and cons of using relational databases to store biomedical big data that previous researches have discussed and used.

Resource for the Development of Biomedical Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS)

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Turteltaub, K. W. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Bench, G. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Buchholz, B. A. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Enright, H. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Kulp, K. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); McCartt, A. D. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Malfatti, M. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Ognibene, T. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Loots, G. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Stewart, B. J. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

2016-04-08

The NIH Research Resource for Biomedical AMS was originally funded at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1999 to develop and apply the technology of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) in broad- based biomedical research. The Resource’s niche is to fill needs for ultra high sensitivity quantitation when isotope-labeled agents are used. The Research Resource’s Technology Research and Development (TR&D) efforts will focus on the needs of the biomedical research community in the context of seven Driving Biomedical Projects (DBPs) that will drive the Center’s technical capabilities through three core TR&Ds. We will expand our present capabilities by developing a fully integrated HPLC AMS to increase our capabilities for metabolic measurements, we will develop methods to understand cellular processes and we will develop and validate methods for the application of AMS in human studies, which is a growing area of demand by collaborators and service users. In addition, we will continue to support new and ongoing collaborative and service projects that require the capabilities of the Resource. The Center will continue to train researchers in the use of the AMS capabilities being developed, and the results of all efforts will be widely disseminated to advance progress in biomedical research. Towards these goals, our specific aims are to:1.) Increase the value and information content of AMS measurements by combining molecular speciation with quantitation of defined macromolecular isolates. Specifically, develop and validate methods for macromolecule labeling, characterization and quantitation.2.) Develop and validate methods and strategies to enable AMS to become more broadly used in human studies. Specifically, demonstrate robust methods for conducting pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamics studies in humans and model systems.3.) Increase the accessibility of AMS to the Biomedical research community and the throughput of AMS through direct coupling to separatory

Resource for the Development of Biomedical Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS)

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Tuerteltaub, K. W. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Bench, G. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Buchholz, B. A. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Enright, H. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Kulp, K. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Loots, G. G. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); McCartt, A. D. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Malfatti, M. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Ognibene, T. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Stewart, B. J. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

2017-03-21

The NIH Research Resource for Biomedical AMS was originally funded at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1999 to develop and apply the technology of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) in broad- based biomedical research. The Resource’s niche is to fill needs for ultra high sensitivity quantitation when isotope-labeled agents are used. The Research Resource’s Technology Research and Development (TR&D) efforts will focus on the needs of the biomedical research community in the context of seven Driving Biomedical Projects (DBPs) that will drive the Center’s technical capabilities through three core TR&Ds. We will expand our present capabilities by developing a fully integrated HPLC AMS to increase our capabilities for metabolic measurements, we will develop methods to understand cellular processes and we will develop and validate methods for the application of AMS in human studies, which is a growing area of demand by collaborators and service users. In addition, we will continue to support new and ongoing collaborative and service projects that require the capabilities of the Resource. The Center will continue to train researchers in the use of the AMS capabilities being developed, and the results of all efforts will be widely disseminated to advance progress in biomedical research. Towards these goals, our specific aims are to:1.) Increase the value and information content of AMS measurements by combining molecular speciation with quantitation of defined macromolecular isolates. Specifically, develop and validate methods for macromolecule labeling, characterization and quantitation.2.) Develop and validate methods and strategies to enable AMS to become more broadly used in human studies. Specifically, demonstrate robust methods for conducting pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamics studies in humans and model systems.3.) Increase the accessibility of AMS to the Biomedical research community and the throughput of AMS through direct coupling to separatory

Preparation of magnetic carbon nanotubes (Mag-CNTs) for biomedical and biotechnological applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Masotti, Andrea; Caporali, Andrea

2013-12-18

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been widely studied for their potential applications in many fields from nanotechnology to biomedicine. The preparation of magnetic CNTs (Mag-CNTs) opens new avenues in nanobiotechnology and biomedical applications as a consequence of their multiple properties embedded within the same moiety. Several preparation techniques have been developed during the last few years to obtain magnetic CNTs: grafting or filling nanotubes with magnetic ferrofluids or attachment of magnetic nanoparticles to CNTs or their polymeric coating. These strategies allow the generation of novel versatile systems that can be employed in many biotechnological or biomedical fields. Here, we review and discuss the most recent papers dealing with the preparation of magnetic CNTs and their application in biomedical and biotechnological fields.

The community FabLab platform: applications and implications in biomedical engineering.

Science.gov (United States)

Stephenson, Makeda K; Dow, Douglas E

2014-01-01

Skill development in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education present one of the most formidable challenges of modern society. The Community FabLab platform presents a viable solution. Each FabLab contains a suite of modern computer numerical control (CNC) equipment, electronics and computing hardware and design, programming, computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided machining (CAM) software. FabLabs are community and educational resources and open to the public. Development of STEM based workforce skills such as digital fabrication and advanced manufacturing can be enhanced using this platform. Particularly notable is the potential of the FabLab platform in STEM education. The active learning environment engages and supports a diversity of learners, while the iterative learning that is supported by the FabLab rapid prototyping platform facilitates depth of understanding, creativity, innovation and mastery. The product and project based learning that occurs in FabLabs develops in the student a personal sense of accomplishment, self-awareness, command of the material and technology. This helps build the interest and confidence necessary to excel in STEM and throughout life. Finally the introduction and use of relevant technologies at every stage of the education process ensures technical familiarity and a broad knowledge base needed for work in STEM based fields. Biomedical engineering education strives to cultivate broad technical adeptness, creativity, interdisciplinary thought, and an ability to form deep conceptual understanding of complex systems. The FabLab platform is well designed to enhance biomedical engineering education.

Harvest: a web-based biomedical data discovery and reporting application development platform.

Science.gov (United States)

Italia, Michael J; Pennington, Jeffrey W; Ruth, Byron; Wrazien, Stacey; Loutrel, Jennifer G; Crenshaw, E Bryan; Miller, Jeffrey; White, Peter S

2013-01-01

Biomedical researchers share a common challenge of making complex data understandable and accessible. This need is increasingly acute as investigators seek opportunities for discovery amidst an exponential growth in the volume and complexity of laboratory and clinical data. To address this need, we developed Harvest, an open source framework that provides a set of modular components to aid the rapid development and deployment of custom data discovery software applications. Harvest incorporates visual representations of multidimensional data types in an intuitive, web-based interface that promotes a real-time, iterative approach to exploring complex clinical and experimental data. The Harvest architecture capitalizes on standards-based, open source technologies to address multiple functional needs critical to a research and development environment, including domain-specific data modeling, abstraction of complex data models, and a customizable web client.

VII Latin American Congress on Biomedical Engineering

CERN Document Server

Bustamante, John; Sierra, Daniel

2017-01-01

This volume presents the proceedings of the CLAIB 2016, held in Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia, 26, 27 & 28 October 2016. The proceedings, presented by the Regional Council of Biomedical Engineering for Latin America (CORAL), offer research findings, experiences and activities between institutions and universities to develop Bioengineering, Biomedical Engineering and related sciences. The conferences of the American Congress of Biomedical Engineering are sponsored by the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE), Society for Engineering in Biology and Medicine (EMBS) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), among other organizations and international agencies to bring together scientists, academics and biomedical engineers in Latin America and other continents in an environment conducive to exchange and professional growth.

Embracing uncertainty, managing complexity: applying complexity thinking principles to transformation efforts in healthcare systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Khan, Sobia; Vandermorris, Ashley; Shepherd, John; Begun, James W; Lanham, Holly Jordan; Uhl-Bien, Mary; Berta, Whitney

2018-03-21

Complexity thinking is increasingly being embraced in healthcare, which is often described as a complex adaptive system (CAS). Applying CAS to healthcare as an explanatory model for understanding the nature of the system, and to stimulate changes and transformations within the system, is valuable. A seminar series on systems and complexity thinking hosted at the University of Toronto in 2016 offered a number of insights on applications of CAS perspectives to healthcare that we explore here. We synthesized topics from this series into a set of six insights on how complexity thinking fosters a deeper understanding of accepted ideas in healthcare, applications of CAS to actors within the system, and paradoxes in applications of complexity thinking that may require further debate: 1) a complexity lens helps us better understand the nebulous term "context"; 2) concepts of CAS may be applied differently when actors are cognizant of the system in which they operate; 3) actor responses to uncertainty within a CAS is a mechanism for emergent and intentional adaptation; 4) acknowledging complexity supports patient-centred intersectional approaches to patient care; 5) complexity perspectives can support ways that leaders manage change (and transformation) in healthcare; and 6) complexity demands different ways of implementing ideas and assessing the system. To enhance our exploration of key insights, we augmented the knowledge gleaned from the series with key articles on complexity in the literature. Ultimately, complexity thinking acknowledges the "messiness" that we seek to control in healthcare and encourages us to embrace it. This means seeing challenges as opportunities for adaptation, stimulating innovative solutions to ensure positive adaptation, leveraging the social system to enable ideas to emerge and spread across the system, and even more important, acknowledging that these adaptive actions are part of system behaviour just as much as periods of stability are. By

An improved rank based disease prediction using web navigation patterns on bio-medical databases

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

P. Dhanalakshmi

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Applying machine learning techniques to on-line biomedical databases is a challenging task, as this data is collected from large number of sources and it is multi-dimensional. Also retrieval of relevant document from large repository such as gene document takes more processing time and an increased false positive rate. Generally, the extraction of biomedical document is based on the stream of prior observations of gene parameters taken at different time periods. Traditional web usage models such as Markov, Bayesian and Clustering models are sensitive to analyze the user navigation patterns and session identification in online biomedical database. Moreover, most of the document ranking models on biomedical database are sensitive to sparsity and outliers. In this paper, a novel user recommendation system was implemented to predict the top ranked biomedical documents using the disease type, gene entities and user navigation patterns. In this recommendation system, dynamic session identification, dynamic user identification and document ranking techniques were used to extract the highly relevant disease documents on the online PubMed repository. To verify the performance of the proposed model, the true positive rate and runtime of the model was compared with that of traditional static models such as Bayesian and Fuzzy rank. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed ranking model is better than the traditional models.

Optimizing biomedical science learning in a veterinary curriculum: a review.

Science.gov (United States)

Warren, Amy L; Donnon, Tyrone

2013-01-01

As veterinary medical curricula evolve, the time dedicated to biomedical science teaching, as well as the role of biomedical science knowledge in veterinary education, has been scrutinized. Aside from being mandated by accrediting bodies, biomedical science knowledge plays an important role in developing clinical, diagnostic, and therapeutic reasoning skills in the application of clinical skills, in supporting evidence-based veterinary practice and life-long learning, and in advancing biomedical knowledge and comparative medicine. With an increasing volume and fast pace of change in biomedical knowledge, as well as increased demands on curricular time, there has been pressure to make biomedical science education efficient and relevant for veterinary medicine. This has lead to a shift in biomedical education from fact-based, teacher-centered and discipline-based teaching to applicable, student-centered, integrated teaching. This movement is supported by adult learning theories and is thought to enhance students' transference of biomedical science into their clinical practice. The importance of biomedical science in veterinary education and the theories of biomedical science learning will be discussed in this article. In addition, we will explore current advances in biomedical teaching methodologies that are aimed to maximize knowledge retention and application for clinical veterinary training and practice.

Anatomy and Physiology of Multiscale Modeling and Simulation in Systems Medicine

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mizeranschi, A.; Groen, D.; Borgdorff, J.; Hoekstra, A.G.; Chopard, B.; Dubitzky, W.; Schmitz, U; Wolkenhauer, O.

2016-01-01

Systems medicine is the application of systems biology concepts, methods, and tools to medical research and practice. It aims to integrate data and knowledge from different disciplines into biomedical models and simulations for the understanding, prevention, cure, and management of complex diseases.

From Biomedical to Psychosomatic Reasoning: A Theoretical Framework

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alireza Monajemi

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Despite a general acceptance of the biopsychosocial model, medical education and patient care are still largely biomedical in focus, and physicians have many deficiencies in biopsychosocial formulations and care. Education in medical schools puts more emphasis on providing biomedical education (BM than biopsychosocial education (BPS; the initial knowledge formed in medical students is mainly with a biomedical approach. Therefore, it seems that psychosocial aspects play a minor role at this level and PSM knowledge will lag behind BM knowledge. However, it seems that the integration of biomedical and psychosocial-knowledge is crucial for a successful and efficient patient encounter. In this paper, based on the theory of medical expertise development, the steps through which biomedical reasoning transforms to psychosomatic reasoning will be discussed.

Systems Approach to Tourism: A Methodology for Defining Complex Tourism System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jere Jakulin Tadeja

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Background and Purpose: The complexity of the tourism system, as well as modelling in a frame of system dynamics, will be discussed in this paper. The phaenomenon of tourism, which possesses the typical properties of global and local organisations, will be presented as an open complex system with all its elements, and an optimal methodology to explain the relations among them. The approach we want to present is due to its transparency an excellent tool for searching systems solutions and serves also as a strategic decision-making assessment. We will present systems complexity and develop three models of a complex tourism system: the first one will present tourism as an open complex system with its elements, which operate inside of a tourism market area. The elements of this system present subsystems, which relations and interdependencies will be explained with two models: causal-loop diagram and a simulation model in frame of systems dynamics.

Metasynthetic computing and engineering of complex systems

CERN Document Server

Cao, Longbing

2015-01-01

Provides a comprehensive overview and introduction to the concepts, methodologies, analysis, design and applications of metasynthetic computing and engineering. The author: Presents an overview of complex systems, especially open complex giant systems such as the Internet, complex behavioural and social problems, and actionable knowledge discovery and delivery in the big data era. Discusses ubiquitous intelligence in complex systems, including human intelligence, domain intelligence, social intelligence, network intelligence, data intelligence and machine intelligence, and their synergy thro

ICNBME-2013: 2. international conference on nanotechnologies and biomedical engineering; German-Moldovan workshop on novel nanomaterials for electronic, photonic and biomedical applications. Proceedings

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Tiginyanu, Ion; Sontea, Victor

2013-01-01

This book includes articles which cover a vast range of subjects, such as: nano technologies and nano materials, micro- and nano-objects, nanostructured and highly integrated systems, biophysics, biomedical instrumentation and devices, biomaterials, medical imaging, information technologies for health care, tele medicine, etc.

Complexity: Outline of the NWO strategic theme Dynamics of complex systems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Burgers, G.; Doelman, A.; Frenken, K.; Hogeweg, P.; Hommes, C.; van der Maas, H.; Mulder, B.; Stam, K.; van Steen, M.; Zandee, L.

2008-01-01

Dynamics of complex systems is one of the program 5 themes in the NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) strategy for the years 2007-2011. The ambition of the current proposal is to initiate integrated activities in the field of complex systems within the Netherlands, to provide

Complexity : outline of the NWO strategic theme dynamics of complex systems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Burgers, G.; Doelman, A.; Frenken, K.; Hogeweg, P.; Hommes, C.; Maas, van der H.; Mulder, B.; Stam, K.; Steen, van M.; Zandee, L.

2008-01-01

Dynamics of complex systems is one of the program 5 themes in the NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) strategy for the years 2007-2011. The ambition of the current proposal is to initiate integrated activities in the field of complex systems within the Netherlands, to provide

Simbody: multibody dynamics for biomedical research.

Science.gov (United States)

Sherman, Michael A; Seth, Ajay; Delp, Scott L

Multibody software designed for mechanical engineering has been successfully employed in biomedical research for many years. For real time operation some biomedical researchers have also adapted game physics engines. However, these tools were built for other purposes and do not fully address the needs of biomedical researchers using them to analyze the dynamics of biological structures and make clinically meaningful recommendations. We are addressing this problem through the development of an open source, extensible, high performance toolkit including a multibody mechanics library aimed at the needs of biomedical researchers. The resulting code, Simbody, supports research in a variety of fields including neuromuscular, prosthetic, and biomolecular simulation, and related research such as biologically-inspired design and control of humanoid robots and avatars. Simbody is the dynamics engine behind OpenSim, a widely used biomechanics simulation application. This article reviews issues that arise uniquely in biomedical research, and reports on the architecture, theory, and computational methods Simbody uses to address them. By addressing these needs explicitly Simbody provides a better match to the needs of researchers than can be obtained by adaptation of mechanical engineering or gaming codes. Simbody is a community resource, free for any purpose. We encourage wide adoption and invite contributions to the code base at https://simtk.org/home/simbody.

Biomedical applications of control engineering

CERN Document Server

Hacısalihzade, Selim S

2013-01-01

Biomedical Applications of Control Engineering is a lucidly written textbook for graduate control engin­eering and biomedical engineering students as well as for medical prac­ti­tioners who want to get acquainted with quantitative methods. It is based on decades of experience both in control engineering and clinical practice.   The book begins by reviewing basic concepts of system theory and the modeling process. It then goes on to discuss control engineering application areas like ·         Different models for the human operator, ·         Dosage and timing optimization in oral drug administration, ·         Measuring symptoms of and optimal dopaminergic therapy in Parkinson’s disease, ·         Measure­ment and control of blood glucose le­vels both naturally and by means of external controllers in diabetes, and ·         Control of depth of anaesthesia using inhalational anaesthetic agents like sevoflurane using both fuzzy and state feedback controllers....

The BioLexicon: a large-scale terminological resource for biomedical text mining

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Thompson Paul

2011-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Due to the rapidly expanding body of biomedical literature, biologists require increasingly sophisticated and efficient systems to help them to search for relevant information. Such systems should account for the multiple written variants used to represent biomedical concepts, and allow the user to search for specific pieces of knowledge (or events involving these concepts, e.g., protein-protein interactions. Such functionality requires access to detailed information about words used in the biomedical literature. Existing databases and ontologies often have a specific focus and are oriented towards human use. Consequently, biological knowledge is dispersed amongst many resources, which often do not attempt to account for the large and frequently changing set of variants that appear in the literature. Additionally, such resources typically do not provide information about how terms relate to each other in texts to describe events. Results This article provides an overview of the design, construction and evaluation of a large-scale lexical and conceptual resource for the biomedical domain, the BioLexicon. The resource can be exploited by text mining tools at several levels, e.g., part-of-speech tagging, recognition of biomedical entities, and the extraction of events in which they are involved. As such, the BioLexicon must account for real usage of words in biomedical texts. In particular, the BioLexicon gathers together different types of terms from several existing data resources into a single, unified repository, and augments them with new term variants automatically extracted from biomedical literature. Extraction of events is facilitated through the inclusion of biologically pertinent verbs (around which events are typically organized together with information about typical patterns of grammatical and semantic behaviour, which are acquired from domain-specific texts. In order to foster interoperability, the BioLexicon is

The BioLexicon: a large-scale terminological resource for biomedical text mining

Science.gov (United States)

2011-01-01

Background Due to the rapidly expanding body of biomedical literature, biologists require increasingly sophisticated and efficient systems to help them to search for relevant information. Such systems should account for the multiple written variants used to represent biomedical concepts, and allow the user to search for specific pieces of knowledge (or events) involving these concepts, e.g., protein-protein interactions. Such functionality requires access to detailed information about words used in the biomedical literature. Existing databases and ontologies often have a specific focus and are oriented towards human use. Consequently, biological knowledge is dispersed amongst many resources, which often do not attempt to account for the large and frequently changing set of variants that appear in the literature. Additionally, such resources typically do not provide information about how terms relate to each other in texts to describe events. Results This article provides an overview of the design, construction and evaluation of a large-scale lexical and conceptual resource for the biomedical domain, the BioLexicon. The resource can be exploited by text mining tools at several levels, e.g., part-of-speech tagging, recognition of biomedical entities, and the extraction of events in which they are involved. As such, the BioLexicon must account for real usage of words in biomedical texts. In particular, the BioLexicon gathers together different types of terms from several existing data resources into a single, unified repository, and augments them with new term variants automatically extracted from biomedical literature. Extraction of events is facilitated through the inclusion of biologically pertinent verbs (around which events are typically organized) together with information about typical patterns of grammatical and semantic behaviour, which are acquired from domain-specific texts. In order to foster interoperability, the BioLexicon is modelled using the Lexical

Ultra low-power biomedical signal processing: An analog wavelet filter approach for pacemakers

OpenAIRE

Pavlík Haddad, S.A.

2006-01-01

The purpose of this thesis is to describe novel signal processing methodologies and analog integrated circuit techniques for low-power biomedical systems. Physiological signals, such as the electrocardiogram (ECG), the electroencephalogram (EEG) and the electromyogram (EMG) are mostly non-stationary. The main difficulty in dealing with biomedical signal processing is that the information of interest is often a combination of features that are well localized temporally (e.g., spikes) and other...

Engineering mechanical microenvironment of macrophage and its biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Jing; Li, Yuhui; Gao, Bin; Qin, Chuanguang; He, Yining; Xu, Feng; Yang, Hui; Lin, Min

2018-03-01

Macrophages are the most plastic cells in the hematopoietic system and can be widely found in almost all tissues. Recently studies have shown that mechanical cues (e.g., matrix stiffness and stress/strain) can significantly affect macrophage behaviors. Although existing reviews on the physical and mechanical cues that regulate the macrophage's phenotype are available, engineering mechanical microenvironment of macrophages in vitro as well as a comprehensive overview and prospects for their biomedical applications (e.g., tissue engineering and immunotherapy) has yet to be summarized. Thus, this review provides an overview on the existing methods for engineering mechanical microenvironment of macrophages in vitro and then a section on their biomedical applications and further perspectives are presented.

Leveraging the national cyberinfrastructure for biomedical research.

Science.gov (United States)

LeDuc, Richard; Vaughn, Matthew; Fonner, John M; Sullivan, Michael; Williams, James G; Blood, Philip D; Taylor, James; Barnett, William

2014-01-01

In the USA, the national cyberinfrastructure refers to a system of research supercomputer and other IT facilities and the high speed networks that connect them. These resources have been heavily leveraged by scientists in disciplines such as high energy physics, astronomy, and climatology, but until recently they have been little used by biomedical researchers. We suggest that many of the 'Big Data' challenges facing the medical informatics community can be efficiently handled using national-scale cyberinfrastructure. Resources such as the Extreme Science and Discovery Environment, the Open Science Grid, and Internet2 provide economical and proven infrastructures for Big Data challenges, but these resources can be difficult to approach. Specialized web portals, support centers, and virtual organizations can be constructed on these resources to meet defined computational challenges, specifically for genomics. We provide examples of how this has been done in basic biology as an illustration for the biomedical informatics community.

Organic Bioelectronic Tools for Biomedical Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Susanne Löffler

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Organic bioelectronics forms the basis of conductive polymer tools with great potential for application in biomedical science and medicine. It is a rapidly growing field of both academic and industrial interest since conductive polymers bridge the gap between electronics and biology by being electronically and ionically conductive. This feature can be employed in numerous ways by choosing the right polyelectrolyte system and tuning its properties towards the intended application. This review highlights how active organic bioelectronic surfaces can be used to control cell attachment and release as well as to trigger cell signaling by means of electrical, chemical or mechanical actuation. Furthermore, we report on the unique properties of conductive polymers that make them outstanding materials for labeled or label-free biosensors. Techniques for electronically controlled ion transport in organic bioelectronic devices are introduced, and examples are provided to illustrate their use in self-regulated medical devices. Organic bioelectronics have great potential to become a primary platform in future bioelectronics. We therefore introduce current applications that will aid in the development of advanced in vitro systems for biomedical science and of automated systems for applications in neuroscience, cell biology and infection biology. Considering this broad spectrum of applications, organic bioelectronics could lead to timely detection of disease, and facilitate the use of remote and personalized medicine. As such, organic bioelectronics might contribute to efficient healthcare and reduced hospitalization times for patients.

An engineering paradigm in the biomedical sciences: Knowledge as epistemic tool.

Science.gov (United States)

Boon, Mieke

2017-10-01

In order to deal with the complexity of biological systems and attempts to generate applicable results, current biomedical sciences are adopting concepts and methods from the engineering sciences. Philosophers of science have interpreted this as the emergence of an engineering paradigm, in particular in systems biology and synthetic biology. This article aims at the articulation of the supposed engineering paradigm by contrast with the physics paradigm that supported the rise of biochemistry and molecular biology. This articulation starts from Kuhn's notion of a disciplinary matrix, which indicates what constitutes a paradigm. It is argued that the core of the physics paradigm is its metaphysical and ontological presuppositions, whereas the core of the engineering paradigm is the epistemic aim of producing useful knowledge for solving problems external to the scientific practice. Therefore, the two paradigms involve distinct notions of knowledge. Whereas the physics paradigm entails a representational notion of knowledge, the engineering paradigm involves the notion of 'knowledge as epistemic tool'. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Archives of Medical and Biomedical Research

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Archives of Medical and Biomedical Research is the official journal of the International Association of Medical and Biomedical Researchers (IAMBR) and the Society for Free Radical Research Africa (SFRR-Africa). It is an internationally peer reviewed, open access and multidisciplinary journal aimed at publishing original ...

CMT for biomedical and other applications

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Spanne, P. [ESRF, Grenoble (France)

1997-02-01

This session includes two presentations describing applications for x-ray tomography using synchrotron radiation for biomedical uses and fluid flow modeling, and outlines advantages for using monoenergetic x-rays. Contrast mechanisms are briefly described and several graphs of absorbed doses and scattering of x-rays are included. Also presented are schematic diagrams of computerized tomographic instrumentation with camera head. A brief description of goals for a real time tomographic system and expected improvements to the system are described. Color photomicrographs of the Berea Sandstone and human bone are provided, as well as a 3-D microtomographic reconstruction of a human vertebra sample.

Complex systems fractionality, time-delay and synchronization

CERN Document Server

Sun, Jian-Qiao

2012-01-01

"Complex Systems: Fractionality, Time-delay and Synchronization" covers the most recent developments and advances in the theory and application of complex systems in these areas. Each chapter was written by scientists highly active in the field of complex systems. The book discusses a new treatise on fractional dynamics and control, as well as the new methods for differential delay systems and control. Lastly, a theoretical framework for the complexity and synchronization of complex system is presented. The book is intended for researchers in the field of nonlinear dynamics in mathematics, physics and engineering. It can also serve as a reference book for graduate students in physics, applied mathematics and engineering. Dr. Albert C.J. Luo is a Professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA. Dr. Jian-Qiao Sun is a Professor at the University of California, Merced, USA.

ReRouting biomedical innovation: observations from a mapping of the alternative research and development (R&D) landscape.

Science.gov (United States)

Greenberg, Alexandra; Kiddell-Monroe, Rachel

2016-09-14

In recent years, the world has witnessed the tragic outcomes of multiple global health crises. From Ebola to high prices to antibiotic resistance, these events highlight the fundamental constraints of the current biomedical research and development (R&D) system in responding to patient needs globally.To mitigate this lack of responsiveness, over 100 self-identified "alternative" R&D initiatives, have emerged in the past 15 years. To begin to make sense of this panoply of initiatives working to overcome the constraints of the current system, UAEM began an extensive, though not comprehensive, mapping of the alternative biomedical R&D landscape. We developed a two phase approach: (1) an investigation, via the RE:Route Mapping, of both existing and proposed initiatives that claim to offer an alternative approach to R&D, and (2) evaluation of those initiatives to determine which are in fact achieving increased access to and innovation in medicines. Through phase 1, the RE:Route Mapping, we examined 81 initiatives that claim to redress the inequity perpetuated by the current system via one of five commonly recognized mechanisms necessary for truly alternative R&D.Preliminary analysis of phase 1 provides the following conclusions: 1. No initiative presents a completely alternative model of biomedical R&D. 2. The majority of initiatives focus on developing incentives for drug discovery. 3. The majority of initiatives focus on rare diseases or diseases of the poor and marginalized. 4. There is an increasing emphasis on the use of push, pull, pool, collaboration and open mechanisms alongside the concept of delinkage in alternative R&D. 5. There is a trend towards public funding and launching of initiatives by the Global South. Given the RE:Route Mapping's inevitable limitations and the assumptions made in its methodology, it is not intended to be the final word on a constantly evolving and complex field; however, its findings are significant. The Mapping's value lies in its

Kennedy's Biomedical Laboratory Makes Multi-Tasking Look Easy

Science.gov (United States)

Dunn, Carol Anne

2009-01-01

If it is one thing that Florida has in abundance, it is sunshine and with that sunshine heat and humidity. For workers at the Kennedy Space Center that have to work outside in the heat and humidity, heat exhaustion/stroke is a real possibility. It might help people to know that Kennedy's Biomedical Laboratory has been testing some new Koolvests(Trademark) that can be worn underneath SCAPE suits. They have also been working on how to block out high noise levels; in fact, Don Doerr, chief of the Biomedical Lab, says, "The most enjoyable aspect is knowing that the Biomedical Lab and the skills of its employees have been used to support safe space flight, not only for the astronaut flight crew, but just as important for the ground processing personnel as well." The NASA Biomedical Laboratory has existed in the John F. Kennedy's Operations and Checkout Building since the Apollo Program. The primary mission of this laboratory has been the biomedical support to major, manned space programs that have included Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, and Shuttle. In this mission, the laboratory has been responsible in accomplishing much of the technical design, planning, provision, fabrication, and maintenance of flight and ground biomedical monitoring instrumentation. This includes the electronics in the launch flight suit and similar instrumentation systems in the spacecraft. (Note: The Lab checked out the system for STS-128 at Pad A using Firing room 4 and ground support equipment in the lab.) During Apollo, there were six engineers and ten technicians in the facility. This has evolved today to two NASA engineers and two NASA technicians, a Life Science Support contract physiologist and part-time support from an LSSC nurse and physician. Over the years, the lab has enjoyed collaboration with outside agencies and investigators. These have included on-site support to the Ames Research Center bed rest studies (seven years) and the European Space Agency studies in Toulouse, France (two

Innovations in biomedical nanoengineering: nanowell array biosensor

Science.gov (United States)

Seo, YoungTae; Jeong, Sunil; Lee, JuKyung; Choi, Hak Soo; Kim, Jonghan; Lee, HeaYeon

2018-04-01

Nanostructured biosensors have pioneered biomedical engineering by providing highly sensitive analyses of biomolecules. The nanowell array (NWA)-based biosensing platform is particularly innovative, where the small size of NWs within the array permits extremely profound sensing of a small quantity of biomolecules. Undoubtedly, the NWA geometry of a gently-sloped vertical wall is critical for selective docking of specific proteins without capillary resistances, and nanoprocessing has contributed to the fabrication of NWA electrodes on gold substrate such as molding process, e-beam lithography, and krypton-fluoride (KrF) stepper semiconductor method. The Lee group at the Mara Nanotech has established this NW-based biosensing technology during the past two decades by engineering highly sensitive electrochemical sensors and providing a broad range of detection methods from large molecules (e.g., cells or proteins) to small molecules (e.g., DNA and RNA). Nanosized gold dots in the NWA enhance the detection of electrochemical biosensing to the range of zeptomoles in precision against the complementary target DNA molecules. In this review, we discuss recent innovations in biomedical nanoengineering with a specific focus on novel NWA-based biosensors. We also describe our continuous efforts in achieving a label-free detection without non-specific binding while maintaining the activity and stability of immobilized biomolecules. This research can lay the foundation of a new platform for biomedical nanoengineering systems.

Mining sensor data from complex systems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Vespier, Ugo

2015-01-01

Today, virtually everything, from natural phenomena to complex artificial and physical systems, can be measured and the resulting information collected, stored and analyzed in order to gain new insight. This thesis shows how complex systems often exhibit diverse behavior at different temporal

Towards an evaluation framework for complex social systems

Science.gov (United States)

McDonald, Diane M.; Kay, Nigel

While there is growing realisation that the world in which we live in is highly complex with multiple interdependencies and irreducibly open to outside influence, how to make these 'systems' more manageable is still a significant outstanding issue. As (2004) suggests, applying the theoretical principles of Complex Systems may help solve complex problems in this complex world. While Bar-Yam provides examples of forward-thinking organisations which have begun to see the relevance of complex systems principles, for many organisations the language and concepts of complexity science such as self-organisation and unpredictability while they make theoretical sense offer no practical or acceptable method of implementation to those more familiar with definitive facts and classical hierarchical, deterministic approaches to control. Complexity Science explains why designed systems or interventions may not function as anticipated in differing environments, without providing a silver bullet which enables control or engineering of the system to ensure the desired results. One familiar process which might, if implemented with complex systems in mind, provide the basis of an accessible and understandable framework that enables policy makers and practitioners to better design and manage complex socio-technical systems is that of evaluation.

KaBOB: ontology-based semantic integration of biomedical databases.

Science.gov (United States)

Livingston, Kevin M; Bada, Michael; Baumgartner, William A; Hunter, Lawrence E

2015-04-23

The ability to query many independent biological databases using a common ontology-based semantic model would facilitate deeper integration and more effective utilization of these diverse and rapidly growing resources. Despite ongoing work moving toward shared data formats and linked identifiers, significant problems persist in semantic data integration in order to establish shared identity and shared meaning across heterogeneous biomedical data sources. We present five processes for semantic data integration that, when applied collectively, solve seven key problems. These processes include making explicit the differences between biomedical concepts and database records, aggregating sets of identifiers denoting the same biomedical concepts across data sources, and using declaratively represented forward-chaining rules to take information that is variably represented in source databases and integrating it into a consistent biomedical representation. We demonstrate these processes and solutions by presenting KaBOB (the Knowledge Base Of Biomedicine), a knowledge base of semantically integrated data from 18 prominent biomedical databases using common representations grounded in Open Biomedical Ontologies. An instance of KaBOB with data about humans and seven major model organisms can be built using on the order of 500 million RDF triples. All source code for building KaBOB is available under an open-source license. KaBOB is an integrated knowledge base of biomedical data representationally based in prominent, actively maintained Open Biomedical Ontologies, thus enabling queries of the underlying data in terms of biomedical concepts (e.g., genes and gene products, interactions and processes) rather than features of source-specific data schemas or file formats. KaBOB resolves many of the issues that routinely plague biomedical researchers intending to work with data from multiple data sources and provides a platform for ongoing data integration and development and for

Modeling and mining term association for improving biomedical information retrieval performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Hu, Qinmin; Huang, Jimmy Xiangji; Hu, Xiaohua

2012-06-11

The growth of the biomedical information requires most information retrieval systems to provide short and specific answers in response to complex user queries. Semantic information in the form of free text that is structured in a way makes it straightforward for humans to read but more difficult for computers to interpret automatically and search efficiently. One of the reasons is that most traditional information retrieval models assume terms are conditionally independent given a document/passage. Therefore, we are motivated to consider term associations within different contexts to help the models understand semantic information and use it for improving biomedical information retrieval performance. We propose a term association approach to discover term associations among the keywords from a query. The experiments are conducted on the TREC 2004-2007 Genomics data sets and the TREC 2004 HARD data set. The proposed approach is promising and achieves superiority over the baselines and the GSP results. The parameter settings and different indices are investigated that the sentence-based index produces the best results in terms of the document-level, the word-based index for the best results in terms of the passage-level and the paragraph-based index for the best results in terms of the passage2-level. Furthermore, the best term association results always come from the best baseline. The tuning number k in the proposed recursive re-ranking algorithm is discussed and locally optimized to be 10. First, modelling term association for improving biomedical information retrieval using factor analysis, is one of the major contributions in our work. Second, the experiments confirm that term association considering co-occurrence and dependency among the keywords can produce better results than the baselines treating the keywords independently. Third, the baselines are re-ranked according to the importance and reliance of latent factors behind term associations. These latent

A System for Complex Robotic Welding

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Madsen, Ole; Sørensen, Carsten Bro; Olsen, Birger

2002-01-01

This paper presents the architecture of a system for robotic welding of complex tasks. The system integrates off-line programming, control of redundant robots, collision-free motion planning and sensor-based control. An implementation for pipe structure welding made at Odense Steel Shipyard Ltd......., Denmark, demonstrates the system can be used for automatic welding of complex products in one-of-a-kind production....

Analysis and control of complex dynamical systems robust bifurcation, dynamic attractors, and network complexity

CERN Document Server

Imura, Jun-ichi; Ueta, Tetsushi

2015-01-01

This book is the first to report on theoretical breakthroughs on control of complex dynamical systems developed by collaborative researchers in the two fields of dynamical systems theory and control theory. As well, its basic point of view is of three kinds of complexity: bifurcation phenomena subject to model uncertainty, complex behavior including periodic/quasi-periodic orbits as well as chaotic orbits, and network complexity emerging from dynamical interactions between subsystems. Analysis and Control of Complex Dynamical Systems offers a valuable resource for mathematicians, physicists, and biophysicists, as well as for researchers in nonlinear science and control engineering, allowing them to develop a better fundamental understanding of the analysis and control synthesis of such complex systems.

Biomedical engineering for health research and development.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, X-Y

2015-01-01

Biomedical engineering is a new area of research in medicine and biology, providing new concepts and designs for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of various diseases. There are several types of biomedical engineering, such as tissue, genetic, neural and stem cells, as well as chemical and clinical engineering for health care. Many electronic and magnetic methods and equipments are used for the biomedical engineering such as Computed Tomography (CT) scans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans, Electroencephalography (EEG), Ultrasound and regenerative medicine and stem cell cultures, preparations of artificial cells and organs, such as pancreas, urinary bladders, liver cells, and fibroblasts cells of foreskin and others. The principle of tissue engineering is described with various types of cells used for tissue engineering purposes. The use of several medical devices and bionics are mentioned with scaffold, cells and tissue cultures and various materials are used for biomedical engineering. The use of biomedical engineering methods is very important for the human health, and research and development of diseases. The bioreactors and preparations of artificial cells or tissues and organs are described here.

An Insufferable Business: Ethics, Nonhuman Animals and Biomedical Experiments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kay Peggs

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Each year millions of nonhuman animals suffer in biomedical experiments for human health benefits. Clinical ethics demand that nonhuman animals are used in the development of pharmaceuticals and vaccines. Nonhuman animals are also used for fundamental biomedical research. Biomedical research that uses nonhuman animals is big business but the financial gains are generally occluded. This paper explores how such research generates profits and gains for those associated with the industry. Research establishments, scientists, laboratories, companies that sell nonhuman animal subjects, that supply equipment for the research, and corporations that market the resulting products are among those that benefit financially. Given the complex articulation of ethical codes, enormous corporate profits that are secured and personal returns that are made, the accepted moral legitimacy of such experiments is compromised. In order to address this, within the confines of the moral orthodoxy, more could to be done to ensure transparency and to extricate the vested financial interests from the human health benefits. But such a determination would not address the fundamental issues that should be at the heart of human actions in respect of the nonhuman animals who are used in experiments. The paper concludes with such an address by calling for an end to the denigration of nonhuman animals as experimental subjects who can be used as commodities for profit-maximisation and as tools in experiments for human health benefits, and the implementation of a more inclusive ethic that is informed by universal concern about the suffering of and compassion for all oppressed beings.

An Insufferable Business: Ethics, Nonhuman Animals and Biomedical Experiments.

Science.gov (United States)

Peggs, Kay

2015-07-22

Each year millions of nonhuman animals suffer in biomedical experiments for human health benefits. Clinical ethics demand that nonhuman animals are used in the development of pharmaceuticals and vaccines. Nonhuman animals are also used for fundamental biomedical research. Biomedical research that uses nonhuman animals is big business but the financial gains are generally occluded. This paper explores how such research generates profits and gains for those associated with the industry. Research establishments, scientists, laboratories, companies that sell nonhuman animal subjects, that supply equipment for the research, and corporations that market the resulting products are among those that benefit financially. Given the complex articulation of ethical codes, enormous corporate profits that are secured and personal returns that are made, the accepted moral legitimacy of such experiments is compromised. In order to address this, within the confines of the moral orthodoxy, more could to be done to ensure transparency and to extricate the vested financial interests from the human health benefits. But such a determination would not address the fundamental issues that should be at the heart of human actions in respect of the nonhuman animals who are used in experiments. The paper concludes with such an address by calling for an end to the denigration of nonhuman animals as experimental subjects who can be used as commodities for profit-maximisation and as tools in experiments for human health benefits, and the implementation of a more inclusive ethic that is informed by universal concern about the suffering of and compassion for all oppressed beings.

Archives: Journal of Medical and Biomedical Sciences

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Items 1 - 20 of 20 ... Archives: Journal of Medical and Biomedical Sciences. Journal Home > Archives: Journal of Medical and Biomedical Sciences. Log in or Register to get access to full text downloads.

Archives: Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Items 1 - 19 of 19 ... Archives: Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research. Journal Home > Archives: Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research. Log in or Register to get access to full text downloads.

Biomedical applications of batteries

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Latham, Roger [Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH (United Kingdom); Linford, Roger [The Research Office, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH (United Kingdom); Schlindwein, Walkiria [School of Pharmacy, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH (United Kingdom)

2004-08-31

An overview is presented of the many ways in which batteries and battery materials are used in medicine and in biomedical studies. These include the use of batteries as power sources for motorised wheelchairs, surgical tools, cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, dynamic prostheses, sensors and monitors for physiological parameters, neurostimulators, devices for pain relief, and iontophoretic, electroporative and related devices for drug administration. The various types of battery and fuel cell used for this wide range of applications will be considered, together with the potential harmful side effects, including accidental ingestion of batteries and the explosive nature of some of the early cardiac pacemaker battery systems.

Modeling Power Systems as Complex Adaptive Systems

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Chassin, David P.; Malard, Joel M.; Posse, Christian; Gangopadhyaya, Asim; Lu, Ning; Katipamula, Srinivas; Mallow, J V.

2004-12-30

Physical analogs have shown considerable promise for understanding the behavior of complex adaptive systems, including macroeconomics, biological systems, social networks, and electric power markets. Many of today's most challenging technical and policy questions can be reduced to a distributed economic control problem. Indeed, economically based control of large-scale systems is founded on the conjecture that the price-based regulation (e.g., auctions, markets) results in an optimal allocation of resources and emergent optimal system control. This report explores the state-of-the-art physical analogs for understanding the behavior of some econophysical systems and deriving stable and robust control strategies for using them. We review and discuss applications of some analytic methods based on a thermodynamic metaphor, according to which the interplay between system entropy and conservation laws gives rise to intuitive and governing global properties of complex systems that cannot be otherwise understood. We apply these methods to the question of how power markets can be expected to behave under a variety of conditions.

Challenges facing academic research in commercializing event-detector implantable devices for an in-vivo biomedical subcutaneous device for biomedical analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Juanola-Feliu, E.; Colomer-Farrarons, J.; Miribel-Català, P.; Samitier, J.; Valls-Pasola, J.

2011-05-01

It is widely recognized that the welfare of the most advanced economies is at risk, and that the only way to tackle this situation is by controlling the knowledge economies and dealing with. To achieve this ambitious goal, we need to improve the performance of each dimension in the "knowledge triangle": education, research and innovation. Indeed, recent findings point to the importance of strategies of adding-value and marketing during R+D processes so as to bridge the gap between the laboratory and the market and so ensure the successful commercialization of new technology-based products. Moreover, in a global economy in which conventional manufacturing is dominated by developing economies, the future of industry in the most advanced economies must rely on its ability to innovate in those high-tech activities that can offer a differential added-value, rather than on improving existing technologies and products. It seems quite clear, therefore, that the combination of health (medicine) and nanotechnology in a new biomedical device is very capable of meeting these requisites. This work propose a generic CMOS Front-End Self-Powered In-Vivo Implantable Biomedical Device, based on a threeelectrode amperometric biosensor approach, capable of detecting threshold values for targeted concentrations of pathogens, ions, oxygen concentration, etc. Given the speed with which diabetes can spread, as diabetes is the fastest growing disease in the world, the nano-enabled implantable device for in-vivo biomedical analysis needs to be introduced into the global diabetes care devices market. In the case of glucose monitoring, the detection of a threshold decrease in the glucose level it is mandatory to avoid critic situations like the hypoglycemia. Although the case study reported in this paper is complex because it involves multiple organizations and sources of data, it contributes to extend experience to the best practices and models on nanotechnology applications and

Engineering β-sheet peptide assemblies for biomedical applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Zhiqiang; Cai, Zheng; Chen, Qiling; Liu, Menghua; Ye, Ling; Ren, Jiaoyan; Liao, Wenzhen; Liu, Shuwen

2016-03-01

Hydrogels have been widely studied in various biomedical applications, such as tissue engineering, cell culture, immunotherapy and vaccines, and drug delivery. Peptide-based nanofibers represent a promising new strategy for current drug delivery approaches and cell carriers for tissue engineering. This review focuses on the recent advances in the use of self-assembling engineered β-sheet peptide assemblies for biomedical applications. The applications of peptide nanofibers in biomedical fields, such as drug delivery, tissue engineering, immunotherapy, and vaccines, are highlighted. The current challenges and future perspectives for self-assembling peptide nanofibers in biomedical applications are discussed.

Modelling methodology for engineering of complex sociotechnical systems

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Oosthuizen, R

2014-10-01

Full Text Available Different systems engineering techniques and approaches are applied to design and develop complex sociotechnical systems for complex problems. In a complex sociotechnical system cognitive and social humans use information technology to make sense...

Stephen Jay Kline on systems, or physics, complex systems, and the gap between.

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Campbell, Philip LaRoche

2011-06-01

At the end of his life, Stephen Jay Kline, longtime professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, completed a book on how to address complex systems. The title of the book is 'Conceptual Foundations of Multi-Disciplinary Thinking' (1995), but the topic of the book is systems. Kline first establishes certain limits that are characteristic of our conscious minds. Kline then establishes a complexity measure for systems and uses that complexity measure to develop a hierarchy of systems. Kline then argues that our minds, due to their characteristic limitations, are unable to model the complex systems in that hierarchy. Computers are of no help to us here. Our attempts at modeling these complex systems are based on the way we successfully model some simple systems, in particular, 'inert, naturally-occurring' objects and processes, such as what is the focus of physics. But complex systems overwhelm such attempts. As a result, the best we can do in working with these complex systems is to use a heuristic, what Kline calls the 'Guideline for Complex Systems.' Kline documents the problems that have developed due to 'oversimple' system models and from the inappropriate application of a system model from one domain to another. One prominent such problem is the Procrustean attempt to make the disciplines that deal with complex systems be 'physics-like.' Physics deals with simple systems, not complex ones, using Kline's complexity measure. The models that physics has developed are inappropriate for complex systems. Kline documents a number of the wasteful and dangerous fallacies of this type.

Innovations in Biomedical Engineering 2016

CERN Document Server

Tkacz, Ewaryst; Paszenda, Zbigniew; Piętka, Ewa

2017-01-01

This book presents the proceedings of the “Innovations in Biomedical Engineering IBE’2016” Conference held on October 16–18, 2016 in Poland, discussing recent research on innovations in biomedical engineering. The past decade has seen the dynamic development of more and more sophisticated technologies, including biotechnologies, and more general technologies applied in the area of life sciences. As such the book covers the broadest possible spectrum of subjects related to biomedical engineering innovations. Divided into four parts, it presents state-of-the-art achievements in: • engineering of biomaterials, • modelling and simulations in biomechanics, • informatics in medicine • signal analysis The book helps bridge the gap between technological and methodological engineering achievements on the one hand and clinical requirements in the three major areas diagnosis, therapy and rehabilitation on the other.

Biomedical Engineering | Classification | College of Engineering & Applied

Science.gov (United States)

Engineering Concentration on Ergonomics M.S. Program in Computer Science Interdisciplinary Concentration on Energy Doctoral Programs in Engineering Non-Degree Candidate Departments Biomedical Engineering Biomedical Engineering Industry Advisory Council Civil & Environmental Engineering Civil &

Complex engineering systems science meets technology

CERN Document Server

Minai, Ali A; Bar-Yam, Yaneer

2006-01-01

Every time that we take money out of an ATM, surf the internet or simply turn on a light switch, we enjoy the benefits of complex engineered systems. Systems like power grids and global communication networks are so ubiquitous in our daily lives that we usually take them for granted, only noticing them when they break down. But how do such amazing technologies and infrastructures come to be what they are? How are these systems designed? How do distributed networks work? How are they made to respond rapidly in 'real time'? And as the demands that we place on these systems become increasingly complex, are traditional systems-engineering practices still relevant? This volume examines the difficulties that arise in creating highly complex engineered systems and new approaches that are being adopted. Topics addressed range from the formal representation and classification of distributed networked systems to revolutionary engineering practices inspired by biological evolution. By bringing together the latest resear...

VI Latin American Congress on Biomedical Engineering

CERN Document Server

Hadad, Alejandro

2015-01-01

This volume presents the proceedings of the CLAIB 2014, held in Paraná, Entre Ríos, Argentina 29, 30 & 31 October 2014. The proceedings, presented by the Regional Council of Biomedical Engineering for Latin America (CORAL) offer research findings, experiences and activities between institutions and universities to develop Bioengineering, Biomedical Engineering and related sciences. The conferences of the American Congress of Biomedical Engineering are sponsored by the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE), Society for Engineering in Biology and Medicine (EMBS) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), among other organizations and international agencies and bringing together scientists, academics and biomedical engineers in Latin America and other continents in an environment conducive to exchange and professional growth. The Topics include: - Bioinformatics and Computational Biology - Bioinstrumentation; Sensors, Micro and Nano Technologies - Biomaterials, Tissu...

John Glenn Biomedical Engineering Consortium

Science.gov (United States)

Nall, Marsha

2004-01-01

The John Glenn Biomedical Engineering Consortium is an inter-institutional research and technology development, beginning with ten projects in FY02 that are aimed at applying GRC expertise in fluid physics and sensor development with local biomedical expertise to mitigate the risks of space flight on the health, safety, and performance of astronauts. It is anticipated that several new technologies will be developed that are applicable to both medical needs in space and on earth.

Decentralized control of complex systems

CERN Document Server

Siljak, Dragoslav D

2011-01-01

Complex systems require fast control action in response to local input, and perturbations dictate the use of decentralized information and control structures. This much-cited reference book explores the approaches to synthesizing control laws under decentralized information structure constraints.Starting with a graph-theoretic framework for structural modeling of complex systems, the text presents results related to robust stabilization via decentralized state feedback. Subsequent chapters explore optimization, output feedback, the manipulative power of graphs, overlapping decompositions and t

Biomedical enhancements as justice.

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Nam, Jeesoo

2015-02-01

Biomedical enhancements, the applications of medical technology to make better those who are neither ill nor deficient, have made great strides in the past few decades. Using Amartya Sen's capability approach as my framework, I argue in this article that far from being simply permissible, we have a prima facie moral obligation to use these new developments for the end goal of promoting social justice. In terms of both range and magnitude, the use of biomedical enhancements will mark a radical advance in how we compensate the most disadvantaged members of society. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Complexity and Control: Towards a Rigorous Behavioral Theory of Complex Dynamical Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Ivancevic, Vladimir G.; Reid, Darryn J.

We introduce our motive for writing this book on complexity and control with a popular "complexity myth," which seems to be quite wide spread among chaos and complexity theory fashionistas: quote>Low-dimensional systems usually exhibit complex behaviours (which we know fromMay's studies of the Logisticmap), while high-dimensional systems usually exhibit simple behaviours (which we know from synchronisation studies of the Kuramoto model)...quote> We admit that this naive view on complex (e.g., human) systems versus simple (e.g., physical) systems might seem compelling to various technocratic managers and politicians; indeed, the idea makes for appealing sound-bites. However, it is enough to see both in the equations and computer simulations of pendula of various degree - (i) a single pendulum, (ii) a double pendulum, and (iii) a triple pendulum - that this popular myth is plain nonsense. The only thing that we can learn from it is what every tyrant already knows: by using force as a strong means of control, it is possible to effectively synchronise even hundreds of millions of people, at least for a while.

World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering

CERN Document Server

2015-01-01

This book presents the proceedings of the IUPESM World Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics, a tri-annual high-level policy meeting dedicated exclusively to furthering the role of biomedical engineering and medical physics in medicine. The book offers papers about emerging issues related to the development and sustainability of the role and impact of medical physicists and biomedical engineers in medicine and healthcare. It provides a unique and important forum to secure a coordinated, multileveled global response to the need, demand, and importance of creating and supporting strong academic and clinical teams of biomedical engineers and medical physicists for the benefit of human health.

Writing intelligible English prose for biomedical journals.

Science.gov (United States)

Ludbrook, John

2007-01-01

1. I present a combination of semi-objective and subjective evidence that the quality of English prose in biomedical scientific writing is deteriorating. 2. I consider seven possible strategies for reversing this apparent trend. These refer to a greater emphasis on good writing by students in schools and by university students, consulting books on science writing, one-on-one mentoring, using 'scientific' measures to reveal lexical poverty, making use of freelance science editors and encouraging the editors of biomedical journals to pay more attention to the problem. 3. I conclude that a fruitful, long-term, strategy would be to encourage more biomedical scientists to embark on a career in science editing. This strategy requires a complementary initiative on the part of biomedical research institutions and universities to employ qualified science editors. 4. An immediately realisable strategy is to encourage postgraduate students in the biomedical sciences to undertake the service courses provided by many universities on writing English prose in general and scientific prose in particular. This strategy would require that heads of departments and supervisors urge their postgraduate students to attend such courses. 5. Two major publishers of biomedical journals, Blackwell Publications and Elsevier Science, now provide lists of commercial editing services on their web sites. I strongly recommend that authors intending to submit manuscripts to their journals (including Blackwell's Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology) make use of these services. This recommendation applies especially to those for whom English is a second language.

New frontiers in biomedical science and engineering during 2014-2015.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Feng; Lee, Dong-Hoon; Lagoa, Ricardo; Kumar, Sandeep

2015-01-01

The International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology (ICBEB) is an international meeting held once a year. This, the fourth International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology (ICBEB2015), will be held in Shanghai, China, during August 18th-21st, 2015. This annual conference intends to provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners at home and abroad to present the most recent frontiers and future challenges in the fields of biomedical science, biomedical engineering, biomaterials, bioinformatics and computational biology, biomedical imaging and signal processing, biomechanical engineering and biotechnology, etc. The papers published in this issue are selected from this Conference, which witness the advances in biomedical engineering and biotechnology during 2014-2015.

MIMI: multimodality, multiresource, information integration environment for biomedical core facilities.

Science.gov (United States)

Szymanski, Jacek; Wilson, David L; Zhang, Guo-Qiang

2009-10-01

The rapid expansion of biomedical research has brought substantial scientific and administrative data management challenges to modern core facilities. Scientifically, a core facility must be able to manage experimental workflow and the corresponding set of large and complex scientific data. It must also disseminate experimental data to relevant researchers in a secure and expedient manner that facilitates collaboration and provides support for data interpretation and analysis. Administratively, a core facility must be able to manage the scheduling of its equipment and to maintain a flexible and effective billing system to track material, resource, and personnel costs and charge for services to sustain its operation. It must also have the ability to regularly monitor the usage and performance of its equipment and to provide summary statistics on resources spent on different categories of research. To address these informatics challenges, we introduce a comprehensive system called MIMI (multimodality, multiresource, information integration environment) that integrates the administrative and scientific support of a core facility into a single web-based environment. We report the design, development, and deployment experience of a baseline MIMI system at an imaging core facility and discuss the general applicability of such a system in other types of core facilities. These initial results suggest that MIMI will be a unique, cost-effective approach to addressing the informatics infrastructure needs of core facilities and similar research laboratories.

A Cross-Lingual Similarity Measure for Detecting Biomedical Term Translations

Science.gov (United States)

Bollegala, Danushka; Kontonatsios, Georgios; Ananiadou, Sophia

2015-01-01

Bilingual dictionaries for technical terms such as biomedical terms are an important resource for machine translation systems as well as for humans who would like to understand a concept described in a foreign language. Often a biomedical term is first proposed in English and later it is manually translated to other languages. Despite the fact that there are large monolingual lexicons of biomedical terms, only a fraction of those term lexicons are translated to other languages. Manually compiling large-scale bilingual dictionaries for technical domains is a challenging task because it is difficult to find a sufficiently large number of bilingual experts. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure for detecting most similar translation candidates for a biomedical term specified in one language (source) from another language (target). Specifically, a biomedical term in a language is represented using two types of features: (a) intrinsic features that consist of character n-grams extracted from the term under consideration, and (b) extrinsic features that consist of unigrams and bigrams extracted from the contextual windows surrounding the term under consideration. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure using each of those feature types. First, to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space in each language, we propose prototype vector projection (PVP)—a non-negative lower-dimensional vector projection method. Second, we propose a method to learn a mapping between the feature spaces in the source and target language using partial least squares regression (PLSR). The proposed method requires only a small number of training instances to learn a cross-lingual similarity measure. The proposed PVP method outperforms popular dimensionality reduction methods such as the singular value decomposition (SVD) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) in a nearest neighbor prediction task. Moreover, our experimental results covering several language pairs such as

A cross-lingual similarity measure for detecting biomedical term translations.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Danushka Bollegala

Full Text Available Bilingual dictionaries for technical terms such as biomedical terms are an important resource for machine translation systems as well as for humans who would like to understand a concept described in a foreign language. Often a biomedical term is first proposed in English and later it is manually translated to other languages. Despite the fact that there are large monolingual lexicons of biomedical terms, only a fraction of those term lexicons are translated to other languages. Manually compiling large-scale bilingual dictionaries for technical domains is a challenging task because it is difficult to find a sufficiently large number of bilingual experts. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure for detecting most similar translation candidates for a biomedical term specified in one language (source from another language (target. Specifically, a biomedical term in a language is represented using two types of features: (a intrinsic features that consist of character n-grams extracted from the term under consideration, and (b extrinsic features that consist of unigrams and bigrams extracted from the contextual windows surrounding the term under consideration. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure using each of those feature types. First, to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space in each language, we propose prototype vector projection (PVP--a non-negative lower-dimensional vector projection method. Second, we propose a method to learn a mapping between the feature spaces in the source and target language using partial least squares regression (PLSR. The proposed method requires only a small number of training instances to learn a cross-lingual similarity measure. The proposed PVP method outperforms popular dimensionality reduction methods such as the singular value decomposition (SVD and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF in a nearest neighbor prediction task. Moreover, our experimental results covering several language

Vestibular factors influencing the biomedical support of humans in space.

Science.gov (United States)

Lichtenberg, B K

1988-01-01

This paper will describe the biomedical support aspects of humans in space with respect to the vestibular system. The vestibular system is thought to be the primary sensory system involved in the short-term effects of space motion sickness although there is increasing evidence that many factors play a role in this complex set of symptoms. There is the possibility that an individual's inner sense of orientation may be strongly coupled with the susceptibility to space motion sickness. A variety of suggested countermeasures for space motion sickness will be described. Although there are no known ground-based tests that can predict space motion sickness, the search should go on. The long term effects of the vestibular system in weightlessness are still relatively unknown. Some preliminary data has shown that the otoconia are irregular in size and distribution following extended periods of weightlessness. The ramifications of this data are not yet known and because the data was obtained on lower order animals, definitive studies and results must wait until the space station era when higher primates can be studied for long durations. This leads us to artificial gravity, the last topic of this paper. The vestibular system is intimately tied to this question since it has been shown on Earth that exposure to a slow rotating room causes motion sickness for some period of time before adaptation occurs. If the artificial gravity is intermittent, will this mean that people will get sick every time they experience it? The data from many astronauts returning to Earth indicates that a variety of sensory illusions are present, especially immediately upon return to a 1-g environment. Oscillopsia or apparent motion of the visual surround upon head motion along with inappropriate eye motions for a given head motion, all indicate that there is much to be studied yet about the vestibular and CNS systems reaction to a sudden application of a steady state acceleration field like 1-g. From

The use of AMS to the biomedical sciences

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Vogel, J.S.

1991-04-01

The Center for Accelerator Mass Spectroscopy (AMS) began making AMS measurements in 1989. Biomedical experiments were originally limited by sample preparation techniques, but we expect the number of biomedical samples to increase five-fold. While many of the detailed techniques for making biomedical measurements resemble those used in other fields, biological tracer experiments differ substantially from the observational approaches of earth science investigators. The role of xenobiotius in initiating mutations in cells is of particular interest. One measure of the damage caused to the genetic material is obtained by counting the number of adducts formed by a chemical agent at a given dose. AMS allows direct measurement of the number of adducts through stoichiometric quantification of the 14 C label attached to the DNA after exposure to a labelled carcinogen. Other isotopes of interest include tritium, 36 Cl, 79 SE, 41 Ca, 26 Al and 129 I. Our experiments with low dose environmental carcinogens reflect the protocols which will become a common part of biomedical AMS. In biomedical experiments, the researcher defines the carbon to be analyzed through dissection and/or chemical purification; thus the sample is ''merely'' combusted and graphitized at the AMS facility. However, since biomedical samples can have a 14 C range of five orders of magnitude, preparation of graphite required construction of a special manifold to prevent cross-contamination. Additionally, a strain of 14 C-depleted C57BL/6 mice is being developed to further reduce background in biomedical experiments. AMS has a bright and diverse future in radioisotope tracing. Such work requires a dedicated amalgamation of AMS scientists and biomedical researchers who will redesign experimental protocols to maximize the AMS technique and minimize the danger of catastrophic contamination. 18 refs., 4 figs., 1 tab

A hybrid model based on neural networks for biomedical relation extraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Yijia; Lin, Hongfei; Yang, Zhihao; Wang, Jian; Zhang, Shaowu; Sun, Yuanyuan; Yang, Liang

2018-05-01

Biomedical relation extraction can automatically extract high-quality biomedical relations from biomedical texts, which is a vital step for the mining of biomedical knowledge hidden in the literature. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are two major neural network models for biomedical relation extraction. Neural network-based methods for biomedical relation extraction typically focus on the sentence sequence and employ RNNs or CNNs to learn the latent features from sentence sequences separately. However, RNNs and CNNs have their own advantages for biomedical relation extraction. Combining RNNs and CNNs may improve biomedical relation extraction. In this paper, we present a hybrid model for the extraction of biomedical relations that combines RNNs and CNNs. First, the shortest dependency path (SDP) is generated based on the dependency graph of the candidate sentence. To make full use of the SDP, we divide the SDP into a dependency word sequence and a relation sequence. Then, RNNs and CNNs are employed to automatically learn the features from the sentence sequence and the dependency sequences, respectively. Finally, the output features of the RNNs and CNNs are combined to detect and extract biomedical relations. We evaluate our hybrid model using five public (protein-protein interaction) PPI corpora and a (drug-drug interaction) DDI corpus. The experimental results suggest that the advantages of RNNs and CNNs in biomedical relation extraction are complementary. Combining RNNs and CNNs can effectively boost biomedical relation extraction performance. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

New routes to the functionalization patterning and manufacture of graphene-based materials for biomedical applications.

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De Sanctis, A; Russo, S; Craciun, M F; Alexeev, A; Barnes, M D; Nagareddy, V K; Wright, C D

2018-06-06

Graphene-based materials are being widely explored for a range of biomedical applications, from targeted drug delivery to biosensing, bioimaging and use for antibacterial treatments, to name but a few. In many such applications, it is not graphene itself that is used as the active agent, but one of its chemically functionalized forms. The type of chemical species used for functionalization will play a key role in determining the utility of any graphene-based device in any particular biomedical application, because this determines to a large part its physical, chemical, electrical and optical interactions. However, other factors will also be important in determining the eventual uptake of graphene-based biomedical technologies, in particular the ease and cost of manufacture of proposed device and system designs. In this work, we describe three novel routes for the chemical functionalization of graphene using oxygen, iron chloride and fluorine. We also introduce novel in situ methods for controlling and patterning such functionalization on the micro- and nanoscales. Our approaches are readily transferable to large-scale manufacturing, potentially paving the way for the eventual cost-effective production of functionalized graphene-based materials, devices and systems for a range of important biomedical applications.

Hydroxyapatite coatings for biomedical applications

CERN Document Server

Zhang, Sam

2013-01-01

Hydroxyapatite coatings are of great importance in the biological and biomedical coatings fields, especially in the current era of nanotechnology and bioapplications. With a bonelike structure that promotes osseointegration, hydroxyapatite coating can be applied to otherwise bioinactive implants to make their surface bioactive, thus achieving faster healing and recovery. In addition to applications in orthopedic and dental implants, this coating can also be used in drug delivery. Hydroxyapatite Coatings for Biomedical Applications explores developments in the processing and property characteri

Passage-Based Bibliographic Coupling: An Inter-Article Similarity Measure for Biomedical Articles

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Rey-Long

2015-01-01

Biomedical literature is an essential source of biomedical evidence. To translate the evidence for biomedicine study, researchers often need to carefully read multiple articles about specific biomedical issues. These articles thus need to be highly related to each other. They should share similar core contents, including research goals, methods, and findings. However, given an article r, it is challenging for search engines to retrieve highly related articles for r. In this paper, we present a technique PBC (Passage-based Bibliographic Coupling) that estimates inter-article similarity by seamlessly integrating bibliographic coupling with the information collected from context passages around important out-link citations (references) in each article. Empirical evaluation shows that PBC can significantly improve the retrieval of those articles that biomedical experts believe to be highly related to specific articles about gene-disease associations. PBC can thus be used to improve search engines in retrieving the highly related articles for any given article r, even when r is cited by very few (or even no) articles. The contribution is essential for those researchers and text mining systems that aim at cross-validating the evidence about specific gene-disease associations. PMID:26440794

Passage-Based Bibliographic Coupling: An Inter-Article Similarity Measure for Biomedical Articles.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rey-Long Liu

Full Text Available Biomedical literature is an essential source of biomedical evidence. To translate the evidence for biomedicine study, researchers often need to carefully read multiple articles about specific biomedical issues. These articles thus need to be highly related to each other. They should share similar core contents, including research goals, methods, and findings. However, given an article r, it is challenging for search engines to retrieve highly related articles for r. In this paper, we present a technique PBC (Passage-based Bibliographic Coupling that estimates inter-article similarity by seamlessly integrating bibliographic coupling with the information collected from context passages around important out-link citations (references in each article. Empirical evaluation shows that PBC can significantly improve the retrieval of those articles that biomedical experts believe to be highly related to specific articles about gene-disease associations. PBC can thus be used to improve search engines in retrieving the highly related articles for any given article r, even when r is cited by very few (or even no articles. The contribution is essential for those researchers and text mining systems that aim at cross-validating the evidence about specific gene-disease associations.

Cell Uptake and Validation of Novel PECs for Biomedical Applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Palamà, Ilaria E; Musarò, Mariarosaria; Coluccia, Addolorata M L; D'Amone, Stefania; Gigli, Giuseppe

2011-01-01

This pilot study provides the proof of principle for biomedical application of novel polyelectrolyte complexes (PECs) obtained via electrostatic interactions between dextran sulphate (DXS) and poly(allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH). Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) showed that DXS/PAH polyelectrolyte complexes were Monodispersed with regular rounded-shape features and average diameters of 250 nm at 2 : 1 weight ratios of DXS/PAH. Fluorescently labelled DXS and fluorescein-isothiocyanate- (FITC-)conjugate DXS were used to follow cell uptake efficiency of PECs and biodegradability of their enzymatically degradable DXS-layers by using confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM). Moreover, quantitative MTT and Trypan Blue assays were employed to validate PECs as feasible and safe nanoscaled carriers at single-cell level without adverse effects on metabolism and viability.

Cell Uptake and Validation of Novel PECs for Biomedical Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ilaria E. Palamà

2011-01-01

Full Text Available This pilot study provides the proof of principle for biomedical application of novel polyelectrolyte complexes (PECs obtained via electrostatic interactions between dextran sulphate (DXS and poly(allylamine hydrochloride (PAH. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM and atomic force microscopy (AFM showed that DXS/PAH polyelectrolyte complexes were Monodispersed with regular rounded-shape features and average diameters of 250 nm at 2 : 1 weight ratios of DXS/PAH. Fluorescently labelled DXS and fluorescein-isothiocyanate- (FITC-conjugate DXS were used to follow cell uptake efficiency of PECs and biodegradability of their enzymatically degradable DXS-layers by using confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM. Moreover, quantitative MTT and Trypan Blue assays were employed to validate PECs as feasible and safe nanoscaled carriers at single-cell level without adverse effects on metabolism and viability.

The Meaning of System: Towards a Complexity Orientation in Systems Thinking

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Leleur, Steen

2017-01-01

when used to complex real-world problems. As regards systems practice it is found that selective use and combination of five presented research approaches (functionalist, interpretive, emancipatory, postmodern and complexity) which function as different but complementing ‘epistemic lenses’ in a process...... described as constructive circularity, may strengthen the exploration and learning efforts in systems-based intervention.......This article reviews the generic meaning of ‘system’ and complements more conventional system notions with a system perception based on recent complexity theory. With system as the core concept of systems theory, its actual meaning is not just of theoretical interest but is highly relevant also...

The Biomedical Resource Ontology (BRO) to enable resource discovery in clinical and translational research.

Science.gov (United States)

Tenenbaum, Jessica D; Whetzel, Patricia L; Anderson, Kent; Borromeo, Charles D; Dinov, Ivo D; Gabriel, Davera; Kirschner, Beth; Mirel, Barbara; Morris, Tim; Noy, Natasha; Nyulas, Csongor; Rubenson, David; Saxman, Paul R; Singh, Harpreet; Whelan, Nancy; Wright, Zach; Athey, Brian D; Becich, Michael J; Ginsburg, Geoffrey S; Musen, Mark A; Smith, Kevin A; Tarantal, Alice F; Rubin, Daniel L; Lyster, Peter

2011-02-01

The biomedical research community relies on a diverse set of resources, both within their own institutions and at other research centers. In addition, an increasing number of shared electronic resources have been developed. Without effective means to locate and query these resources, it is challenging, if not impossible, for investigators to be aware of the myriad resources available, or to effectively perform resource discovery when the need arises. In this paper, we describe the development and use of the Biomedical Resource Ontology (BRO) to enable semantic annotation and discovery of biomedical resources. We also describe the Resource Discovery System (RDS) which is a federated, inter-institutional pilot project that uses the BRO to facilitate resource discovery on the Internet. Through the RDS framework and its associated Biositemaps infrastructure, the BRO facilitates semantic search and discovery of biomedical resources, breaking down barriers and streamlining scientific research that will improve human health. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Advances in biomedical signal and image processing – A systematic review

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

J. Rajeswari

Full Text Available Biomedical signal and image processing establish a dynamic area of specialization in both academic as well as research aspects of biomedical engineering. The concepts of signal and image processing have been widely used for extracting the physiological information in implementing many clinical procedures for sophisticated medical practices and applications. In this paper, the relationship between electrophysiological signals, i.e., electrocardiogram (ECG, electromyogram (EMG, electroencephalogram (EEG and functional image processing and their derived interactions have been discussed. Examples have been investigated in various case studies such as neurosciences, functional imaging, and cardiovascular system, by using different algorithms and methods. The interaction between the extracted information obtained from multiple signals and modalities seems to be very promising. The advanced algorithms and methods in the area of information retrieval based on time-frequency representation have been investigated. Finally, some examples of algorithms have been discussed in which the electrophysiological signals and functional images have been properly extracted and have a significant impact on various biomedical applications. Keywords: Biomedical signals and images, Processing, Analysis

Complex Physical, Biophysical and Econophysical Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Dewar, Robert L.; Detering, Frank

1. Introduction to complex and econophysics systems: a navigation map / T. Aste and T. Di Matteo -- 2. An introduction to fractional diffusion / B. I. Henry, T.A.M. Langlands and P. Straka -- 3. Space plasmas and fusion plasmas as complex systems / R. O. Dendy -- 4. Bayesian data analysis / M. S. Wheatland -- 5. Inverse problems and complexity in earth system science / I. G. Enting -- 6. Applied fluid chaos: designing advection with periodically reoriented flows for micro to geophysical mixing and transport enhancement / G. Metcalfe -- 7. Approaches to modelling the dynamical activity of brain function based on the electroencephalogram / D. T. J. Liley and F. Frascoli -- 8. Jaynes' maximum entropy principle, Riemannian metrics and generalised least action bound / R. K. Niven and B. Andresen -- 9. Complexity, post-genomic biology and gene expression programs / R. B. H. Williams and O. J.-H. Luo -- 10. Tutorials on agent-based modelling with NetLogo and network analysis with Pajek / M. J. Berryman and S. D. Angus.

Signal and image analysis for biomedical and life sciences

CERN Document Server

Sun, Changming; Pham, Tuan D; Vallotton, Pascal; Wang, Dadong

2014-01-01

With an emphasis on applications of computational models for solving modern challenging problems in biomedical and life sciences, this book aims to bring collections of articles from biologists, medical/biomedical and health science researchers together with computational scientists to focus on problems at the frontier of biomedical and life sciences. The goals of this book are to build interactions of scientists across several disciplines and to help industrial users apply advanced computational techniques for solving practical biomedical and life science problems. This book is for users in t

CRISPR Editing in Biological and Biomedical Investigation.

Science.gov (United States)

Ju, Xing-Da; Xu, Jing; Sun, Zhong Sheng

2018-01-01

The CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat)-Cas (CRISPR-associated protein) system, a prokaryotic RNA-based adaptive immune system against viral infection, is emerging as a powerful genome editing tool in broad research areas. To further improve and expand its functionality, various CRISPR delivery strategies have been tested and optimized, and key CRISPR system components such as Cas protein have been engineered with different purposes. Benefiting from more in-depth understanding and further development of CRISPR, versatile CRISPR-based platforms for genome editing have been rapidly developed to advance investigations in biology and biomedicine. In biological research area, CRISPR has been widely adopted in both fundamental and applied research fields, such as genomic and epigenomic modification, genome-wide screening, cell and animal research, agriculture transforming, livestock breeding, food manufacture, industrial biotechnology, and gene drives in disease agents control. In biomedical research area, CRISPR has also shown its extensive applicability in the establishment of animal models for genetic disorders, generation of tissue donors, implementation of antimicrobial and antiviral studies, identification and assessment of new drugs, and even treatment for clinical diseases. However, there are still several problems to consider, and the biggest concerns are the off-target effects and ethical issues of this technology. In this prospect article, after highlighting recent development of CRISPR systems, we outline different applications and current limitations of CRISPR in biological and biomedical investigation. Finally, we provide a perspective on future development and potential risks of this multifunctional technology. J. Cell. Biochem. 119: 52-61, 2018. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Automatic Emergence Detection in Complex Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eugene Santos

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Complex systems consist of multiple interacting subsystems, whose nonlinear interactions can result in unanticipated (emergent system events. Extant systems analysis approaches fail to detect such emergent properties, since they analyze each subsystem separately and arrive at decisions typically through linear aggregations of individual analysis results. In this paper, we propose a quantitative definition of emergence for complex systems. We also propose a framework to detect emergent properties given observations of its subsystems. This framework, based on a probabilistic graphical model called Bayesian Knowledge Bases (BKBs, learns individual subsystem dynamics from data, probabilistically and structurally fuses said dynamics into a single complex system dynamics, and detects emergent properties. Fusion is the central element of our approach to account for situations when a common variable may have different probabilistic distributions in different subsystems. We evaluate our detection performance against a baseline approach (Bayesian Network ensemble on synthetic testbeds from UCI datasets. To do so, we also introduce a method to simulate and a metric to measure discrepancies that occur with shared/common variables. Experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baseline. In addition, we demonstrate that this framework has uniform polynomial time complexity across all three learning, fusion, and reasoning procedures.

[Biomedical research in Revista de Biologia Tropical].

Science.gov (United States)

Gutiérrez, José María

2002-01-01

The contributions published in Revista de Biología Tropical in the area of Biomedical Sciences are reviewed in terms of number of contributions and scope of research subjects. Biomedical Sciences, particularly Parasitology and Microbiology, constituted the predominant subject in the Revista during the first decade, reflecting the intense research environment at the School of Microbiology of the University of Costa Rica and at Hospital San Juan de Dios. The relative weight of Biomedicine in the following decades diminished, due to the outstanding increment in publications in Biological Sciences; however, the absolute number of contributions in Biomedical Sciences remained constant throughout the last decades, with around 80 contributions per decade. In spite of the predominance of Parasitology as the main biomedical subject, the last decades have witnessed the emergence of new areas of interest in the Revista, such as Pharmacology of natural products, Toxinology, especially related to snake venoms, and Human Genetics. This retrospective analysis evidences that Biomedical Sciences, particularly those related to Tropical Medicine, were a fundamental component during the first years of Revista de Biología Tropical, and have maintained a significant presence in the scientific output of this journal, the most relevant scientific publication in biological sciences in Central America.

Analysis of uncertainty and variability in finite element computational models for biomedical engineering:characterization and propagation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nerea Mangado

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Computational modeling has become a powerful tool in biomedical engineering thanks to its potential to simulate coupled systems. However, real parameters are usually not accurately known and variability is inherent in living organisms. To cope with this, probabilistic tools, statistical analysis and stochastic approaches have been used. This article aims to review the analysis of uncertainty and variability in the context of finite element modeling in biomedical engineering. Characterization techniques and propagation methods are presented, as well as examples of their applications in biomedical finite element simulations. Uncertainty propagation methods, both non-intrusive and intrusive, are described. Finally, pros and cons of the different approaches and their use in the scientific community are presented. This leads us to identify future directions for research and methodological development of uncertainty modeling in biomedical engineering.

Analysis of Uncertainty and Variability in Finite Element Computational Models for Biomedical Engineering: Characterization and Propagation.

Science.gov (United States)

Mangado, Nerea; Piella, Gemma; Noailly, Jérôme; Pons-Prats, Jordi; Ballester, Miguel Ángel González

2016-01-01

Computational modeling has become a powerful tool in biomedical engineering thanks to its potential to simulate coupled systems. However, real parameters are usually not accurately known, and variability is inherent in living organisms. To cope with this, probabilistic tools, statistical analysis and stochastic approaches have been used. This article aims to review the analysis of uncertainty and variability in the context of finite element modeling in biomedical engineering. Characterization techniques and propagation methods are presented, as well as examples of their applications in biomedical finite element simulations. Uncertainty propagation methods, both non-intrusive and intrusive, are described. Finally, pros and cons of the different approaches and their use in the scientific community are presented. This leads us to identify future directions for research and methodological development of uncertainty modeling in biomedical engineering.